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OUR INLAND SEA. 



OUR INLAND SEA 

THE STORY OF A HOMESTEAD 

BY ALFRED LAMBOURNE 



^ 




THE DESERET NEWS 

Publishers 

1909 






L!E-;f,3Y of CONGRESS 
Two CoDies Received 

FEB 19 ia09 

Copy.;i;ril tntry ^ 
'JLAS3 <X- X,\c. No. 

COPY 3. 



Copyright, 1909, 
By Alfred Lambourne. 



PREFACE. 

Our Inland Sea now appears in its final form. 
It was, in part, first issued as newspaper and 
magazine articles, and secondly as an illustrated 
pamphlet. The latter publication was given an 
extensive circulation on both sides the Atlantic, 
having passed through many issues, so that in 
that form, the work appeared to contain — ten 
years having elapsed between the first and last 
editions — a certain vitality. It was originally 
printed in book form — Boston, 1895 — for use as 
a presentation souvenir ; few of these volumes, 
however, having been seen by the public. Once 
again it was issued in book form, locally, 1902. 
In the present volume there is much additional, 
and an almost entirely new arrangement of the 
matter that the work contains. 

As will readily be seen, the book is composed 
of paragraphs taken from an irregular diary, 
segregated, of course, from other matter con- 



6 PREFACE. 

tained therein and re-arranged, with now and 
then a conjunctional word or sentence, and a few 
imaginary and explanatory paragraphs. 

It was the writer's desire to carry out to the 
full the plan here outlined. He would, had it 
been possible to him, have made out of what is 
now a past dream, an unquestioned reality. The 
arrangements by which he surrendered his 
Homestead Right — No. 12592 — to the State of 
Utah, and the legal fight thereafter, the questions 
as to whether the land was of a mineral or agri- 
cultural character, are matters of local and de- 
partmental record. The receipts for attorneys' 
fees; papers of hearing; demurrers; answers to 
demurrers, etc., without end, are facts. So, too, 
is the key to my hut which I still retain ; and the 
circulars, catalogues, etc., which I received whilst 
planning my vineyard, a vineyard which the local 
papers declared at the time, was to be like unto 
that cl Naboth, whose luxuriant beauty caused a 
tragic episode in the history of ancient Israel. 



"That is best which lieth nearest." 



INTRODUCTION. 

The Inland Sea is unique. In the Quartemary 
period, so our geologists tell us, a vast body of 
glacier-fed water covered the valleys of north- 
western Utah. Of the ancient Bonneville, as the 
vanished sea is designated, our subject is the bit- 
ter fragment. The first mention of the Inland 
Sea was made by Baron La Hontan, in 1689. A 
Mr. MiUer, of the Jacob Astor party, stood by its 
shore in 1820, and Mr. John Bedyear in 1825. 
Members of Captain Bonneville's expedition 
looked upon its waters from near the mouth of 
Ogden River, in 1833, and Bonneville gave a 
rather fanciful description of the sea, as viewed 
from the mountain side (Irving), although it is 
not certain if ever he was himself, an eye-witness 
of the scene. However his name attaches to the 
great fossil body of water, whose shore lines may 
still be seen along the sides of the neighboring 
valleys. 



10 INTRODUCTION. 

Once the Inland Sea was described as a sullen, 
listless, deadly sheet of water. Such it is not. On 
the contrary, however, one must receive with 
caution, the statements of later writers. Alter- 
nately one is captivated by the strange beauty 
which the place presents, or repelled by the ugli- 
ness that is seen along its shores. 

By the low grounds marking the margins of 
the valleys; by the flats, white with encrusted 
salt and alkali ; the beaches are truly forbidding. 
Melancholy appears to have there taken up its 
permanent abode. 

Where the mountains stoop to the sea, or 
where the islands lift from its surface, are scenes 
both grand and imposing. There are beaches of 
pebbles and sand ; extensive marshes, at the river 
mouths, haunted by the birds that love such 
places ; shores on which are monster boulders, or 
which are littered with heaps of fallen stone; 
high cliffs look down upon the passer-by, along 
the horizon are chains of noble mountains, and 
always are the shining waters respondent to the 



INTRODUCTION. 11 

changing skies, and the light of a brilliant and 
prismatic luminary. 

The Inland Sea is 4210 feet above ocean level. 
Its length is somewhere betvi^een seventy and 
eighty miles, its width between thirty and forty. 
It contains four large islands — Stansbury's, 
Church, Carrington and Fremont, and three that 
are smaller — Strong's Knob, Dolphin and Gun- 
nison. Along the eastern shore lies the lofty 
Wasatch ; to the south the Oquirrh, the Onaqui, 
Tuilla or Grantsville Mountains, and to the west, 
the Terrace and other spurs of the Desert Range. 

Black Rock, Garfield Beach and Saltair Pa- 
vilion are all on the southern shore. From either 
of these three points, looking northward, sky and 
water are seen to meet, save on very clear days, 
when the Malad and Raft River Mountains greet 
the sight, defining, in that direction, the barrier 
line of the ancient Bonneville. 

Another quarter of a century, it has been pre- 
dicted, and the Inland Sea will be no more. Obit* 
has been written of Bonneville, and the older La 



12 INTRODUCTION. 

Hontan, and it may be that this later resultant 
body of water is doomed. But if these pages re- 
cord the passing away of a great natural phenom- 
enon, the last days of the Inland Sea, remains to 
be seen. 



CONTENTS. 

I. Gunnison Island in Winter 19 

II. Books and a Raven 31 

III. Wild and Windy March 43 

IV. Redeeming the Waste 53 

V. Snow- Waves and Flowers 63 

VI. A Cruise Round My Home 73 

VII. The Twenty-first of June 85 

VIII. Under the Dog-Star 95 

IX. A Guest in the Vineyard 107 

X. Contents of a Cairn 119 

XL Old and New Death 131 

XII. The Harvests of Time 141 

XIII. From Life to Life 153 

XIV. The Pageants of History 163 

XV. And Lo! the Plagues 175 

XVI. The Autumnal Equinox 185 

XVII. My Homestead Horizons 197 

XVIII. On Slope and on Shore 209 

XIX. Voice of the Swan 221 

XX. A Last Drift-wood Fire 231 

XXI. Gunnison Island — Farewell 241 

Supplement 249 



HEADING AND PAGE VIGNETTES 
BY JAMES T. HARWOOD. 

PAGE VIGNETTES. 

"The Silent, Implacable Days" 32 

Springtime on the Heights 66 ^ 

Monolith on the Northern Cliff 88 / 

Lake Blanche, Wasatch Mts 122 / 

Moonlight at Lake Lillian . 156 

Storm at the Northern Cliff 188 '^ 

Sunset on the Desert Edge 224 • 



GUNNISON ISLAND IN WINTER. 











OUR INLAND SEA 



GUNNISON ISLAND IN WINTER. 



GHOSTLY, wrapped in its shroud of snow, 
my island stands white above the black- 
ness of unfreezing waters. 
What have I done? Although I had lived 
these days by anticipation, no sooner had the sails 
of the departing yacht vanished below the watery 

19 



20 OUR INLAND SEA. 

horizon, and left me with my thoughts alone, 
than I realized at once, and with a strange sink- 
ing of the heart, how more intense, indeed, how 
deeper than all imagining, is the wildness and 
desolation of the savage poem around me. 

Clearly I have committed an error ! In winter 
this comfortless place might be some lonely spot 
of the Arctics. Often on still nights the snow 
around my dwelling is illumined by the boreal 
light. Through the hours, at times of tempest, is 
heard the grinding of boulders, as they are lifted 
by the heavy brine and then let fall again to 
pound great holes in the outlying strata, or the 
roar of the breakers as they hurl briny foam far 
up the face of the Northern Cliff. 

"A man," says Alger, "may keep by himself be- 
cause he is either a knave or a fool," and Bacon, 
in writing "Of Friendship," has put in italics this 
quoted sentence from Aristotle. ** Whosoever is 
delighted in solitude is either a. wild beast or a 
qod/* Now I am not a knave, and there are 
good reasons, I hope, why I should not consider 



OUR INLAND SEA. 21 

myself a fool. Neither am I a wild beast, nor 
may I arrogate unto myself the belief that I am 
a god. Yet for the time being, I have chosen 
to be alone. 

"What a man has in himself," writes Schop- 
enhauer, "is the chief element in his happiness." 
This, however, the sage makes haste to define as 
— "apart from health and beauty — the power to 
observe and commune." "The proper study of 
mankind is man." We must allow that dictum. 
Nature is secondary. The alleys in the wood or 
forest of Windsor or Arden were but backgrounds 
in the mind of Shakespeare — stage-settings for 
the actors in the human drama. 

Here is the digest of the thought I follow: 
**If the seeking of isolation proceed not out of 
a. mere love of solitude ^ but out of a. lo'be and 
desire to sequester a man's self for a higher 
conversation f then, indeed/' writes Veralum, 
''one may feel the god-like within us/' 
And in this benefit I hope to share. Saying unto 
my soul : From out the wildness of this des- 
ert solitude, I desire to extract the beautiful 



22 OUR INLAND SEA. 

and the good, and to be taught, too, by the 
voices that dwell therein, I plead NOT GUILTY 
to the charges of moroseness, and also to 
those equal follies against %>hich the master 
last quoted has warned us — "a too great admira- 
tion of antiquity and a loT^e of novelty/' 

Is this the North Cape? Dreary is the land 
and dreary is the sea. My hut, massive though 
small, its low, thick walls, built of rough, untrim- 
med slabs of stone, taken from the cliff by which 
they stand, its roof, earth-covered, its chimney 
starting from the ground, and almost as big as 
the hut itself — might be that of some hardy Lo- 
foten fisherman. By the distant islands, that on 
winter days appear like mighty bergs, by the 
tongues of land, resembling snow-covered floes, 
by the brine, more like a plain of ice than water, 
and by the midnight moon, with a lonely storm- 
ring round it, the northern feeling is further sup- 
plied. I rise late. Oil and drift-wood are not so 
plentiful that one should use unseemly hours for 
their burning. Slowly, O slowly, the hours 
creep by ! 



OUR INLAND SEA. 23 

More trying are the silent, implacable days 
than are the times of uproar. I am made to con- 
fess that "Time is the most terrible, the most dis- 
couraging, the most unconquerable of all obsta- 
cles." For exercise, when the weather is clear, I 
hack at the tough, old roots of the Sarcobatus 
bushes, or, again, I grub among the roots of the 
antique sage. Already the thoughts of social in- 
tercourse grow strangely remote. For Christ- 
mas Carol, for New Year's Greeting, I hear only 
the shrill, sudden call of the gull, or the dry, 
harsh croak of the passing raven. In the still- 
ness, the bitter cold frets the surface of wind- 
drift and level, in the lengthened night, the 
storm-clouds hang low, or slowly big snow- 
flakes fall out of the sky. 

Sometimes the vault appears black. That is, I 
mean, as we sometimes see it on the mountain 
tops, as it is on certain noon-days when the sky 
is cloudless, and the near snow-fields rise against 
it. Black, as it really is, with a thin, scumbling 
of atmospheric cobalt. Then the island snow 
takes on the spectrum hues. The angles, flut- 



24 OUR INLAND SEA. 

ings, waves, and mounds of wind-carved drifts 
catch the white light, and resolves it back into 
its component parts. Sometimes the distant 
mountain heights smoke in the dawn like tired 
horses, or the sun rises like a disk of copper, 
ruddy through the spindrift brine. There are 
times when, by the light of a half-wasted morn- 
ing moon, the new island snow appears of a 
wondrous lilac, or, on the jutting shoulder of The 
Northern Cliff, it is touched with a paly gold. On 
cloudy days, during the mid-winter thaw, they 
shrink in the breath of Chinook and grow leaden- 
hued, or, as some storm rolls back to the moun- 
tain summits, they seem bathed in a mixture of 
fire and blood, or, later, as the light of sunset 
fades along the cliff -top, they become of that cold 
and ghastly green, the sight of which makes one 
shudder. 

Sometimes, indeed, a feeling of awe is upon 
me. Often, as in the Norse Mythology, the sun 
comes up, all faint and wan, sick nigh unto death 
it seems, and languidly looks o'er the world of 
white. What thoughts are mine! In the dim, 



OUR INLAND SEA. 25 

uncertain, and mysterious twilight, when all sur- 
rounding objects expand to the sight, I half ex- 
pect to see, looking upon me from out the west- 
ern desert, some angry deity of the Indian's for- 
gotten pantheon ; or, as my thoughts revert again 
to the olden world, to see, springing from that 
Nifelheim in the north, the gaunt, gray form of 
the Fenris Wolf, and to behold his fiery eyes as 
he passes onward to his terrible feast, when the 
Asas, Odin and Thor, and the lesser ones, too, 
shall become his prey in Rangnarok, the last, 
weird twilight of the Northern gods. 

On the mountains, today, a wind-storm is rag- 
ing. So fierce up there is the gale, one could 
scarcely keep his footing. The great snow-ban- 
ners are whirled from the crests, and grand and 
solemn, I know, is the sound, when the strong 
northern winds smite upon those harps, the pines, 
and when, along the mountain sides, the loosened 
snow is caught from the forest branches and sent 
madly up by crag and ravine. But see ! How the 
wind can revel on these waters, too ! Behold how 



26 OUR INLAND SEA. 

they sweep over the long reaches of unbroken 
brine ; how they pick up the foam-dust from the 
waves of the Inland Sea, and, mixing it with 
snow-dust from the island cliffs, whirl it around 
and around! Yesterday the sun-dogs gleamed 
over the desert hills — but now ! Did Dante, as he 
walked with Virgil amid the shades of the In- 
ferno, witness more fierce commotion ? As fierce- 
ly as were the spirits of the carnal malefactors 
"hurtled" by the infernal hurricane, the sleet and 
snow, the foam and spray, are whirled by these 
winter winds. As fiercely they are hurled back 
again and again from the face of the northern 
walls. 

Tonight the wind roars. What care I? The 
louder the rumble in the spacious chimney, the 
brighter will burn my drift-wood fire. One must 
oppose his resources of mind to the blind anger of 
nature, and trust in the end to prevail. What to 
me, in this comfortable room, if the wind grows 
furious in its strength, and beats and clamors at 
window and door? No sail, I know, is out on this 
winter sea. What if the waves boom by the 



OUR INLAND SEA. 27 

Northern Cliff, if the wind veer again and drive 
the foam far up the sands of the little bay ? There 
will be no need to hang out the signal lamp. The 
Inland Sea and the bleak, inhospitable season, 
will keep both my island and myself in unbroken 
ostracism. The sleet and the hail may lash 
against the window-panes, but it is only such as 
might have been foreseen. There must pass 
many and many a day ere the yacht will put 
forth. So stir the embers of the smoldering fire ; 
let the red sparks fly, remember that thy food is 
safe-cached, and that the hut is firm-planted and 
strong as the gale. 



BOOKS AND A RAVEN. 




II 

BOOKS AND A RAVEN. 



AND while I rest here, a center of gravity in 
the midst of chaos; while I wonder, by 
the simple exercise of my Homestead 
Right, what act I have done, here, also, are the 
World, the Flesh and — the Devil. 

What is a hermit if he lacks a devil? Pagan or 
Christian, cynic or saint, what ever he be, must 
not the hermit possess his familiar? Apropos, 
then, I consider this comer. 

He is huge, he is ancient of days. In breadth 
of wing, Devil spreads a full three inches beyond 

31 



OUR INLAND SEA. 33 

raven's wounds, it may be, were but a trick. That 
twinkle in his eye means much. But, no, he shall 
not pick out these eyes of mine. He may hope 
to catch me some day as the demon would have 
caught the Theban of old. Yet this wild was not 
sought by me that I might escape the sex. Devil 
may eye my nude as he will, and I will laugh at 
old Burton and his Anatomy of Melancholy. Yet 
this is the unfriendliness rather than the sweets 
of seclusion. Whatever mischief the bird may 
have in his head remains to be seen. 

Be this, however, placed to the raven's ac- 
count. He is not without his merits. Roam as 
he will by day, he returns to his home at night. 
Always the set of sun sees him approaching the 
hut. "For Devils Only." From the Middle Ages, 
I have taken a hint — for the raven I have made 
a door of his own. In the morning hours the 
mood of the bird is frolicsome ; at noon he is keen 
and has paid at least one visit to each of his hid- 
den stores. At twilight he resents all familiarity 
of man or beast, and at night, if disturbed, then 
Devil is a devil indeed. 



34 OUR INLAND SEA. 

For a Homesteader, these are peculiar, almost 
incongruous surroundings. The hut is rough on 
the outside but is bright and cozy within. In self- 
banishment, this follower of Adam's trade has 
kept his household gods around him. In this 
room there is that to both please the eye and to 
feed the mind. Austere thought is forced upon 
one by the austerity of these rigid scenes. Sack- 
cloth and ashes rules not in the hut, yet no place 
is this island for a Castle of Indolence. The great 
German was right. One needs a focal point of 
contrast. Amid the barrenness of this desert wild, 
the soul has need of a gentler touch. Were not 
the influence of nature corrected, the tendency 
here would be toward harshness of mind. One 
needs the complex — food for the desires put into 
the blood and brain by thousands of years of civ- 
ilization. 

A bed — a bunk, I should say ; shelving ; a table ; 
a rack — formed from the skull of a mountain 
sheep, with curved and massive horns; — a bin, 
and the means for cooking, these are part of my 
goods. On the other hand is my easel. In its 



OUR INLAND SEA. 35 

dark mahogany case, the piano stands. There is 
a statuette by Danneker — Ariadne — and a Nav- 
ajo blanket of quaint design keeps from dust and 
grime my allotment of books. On the wall there 
is a plate after Titian — Sacred and Profane Love 
— a portrait with autograph attached, of a famous 
modem beauty, and over all, "a chain-dropp'd 
lamp" sheds a mellow ray. 

Hermits the world over must live to a purpose. 
Thoreau, at Walden Pond, tried a social experi- 
ment. Forbes watched the flow of an alpine 
glacier; from mistrust of mankind, Timon of 
Athens dwelt in a cave ; for love, Petrarch sought 
the quiet of Vacluse, and to fast and pray, St.. 
Godric lived in the Fens, and St. Berach on Ork- 
ney Isle. No gold lies buried in these sands, at 
some future day no bell or crozier will be found, 
near my hut. But I have my purpose, I know 
my place on the soil. 

To be of use, to redeem the barren ^waste^ to 
make sure in the future my daily bread: these are 
among my desires. Possession always gives a 
certain amount of contented pride, and over my 



36 OUR INLAND SEA. 

desert acreage, whereon the vine may yet grow, I 
look as fondly as does ever the family inheritor 
of broad estates. I come here not to practice re- 
nunciation, but to begin a life anew. 

Lo,the demi-lion rampant, the ship's rudder, 
of which one was proud — 

"That 'Bar, this Bend, that Fess, this Cheverono'' 

Even among these democratic rocks, though he 
were Boone, one may proudly recall the land of 
his birth. With newness of action, one need not 
forget the ancestors' thought. Why regret the 
Hall, the Manor, the Hamlet, that Titheing, that 
parish, that chepping, the bridge, the stream, the 
vale, whose name one bears? Why regret the es- 
tate in Essex or Berkshire? Or the lands by the 
Cornish Sea? There are other holdings than 
those at Donnington, or those at the Saxon 
Camp, on the downs by White-Horse Hill. 

"Rather use than fame," Merlin's motto will 
serve. If coat-of-arms the Homesteader's chil- 
dren should need, then let it be this: On a field 
azure, an island, or ; in the middle chief, the gull, 



OUR INLAND SEA. 37 

argent; on the base, a pruning-hook, sable, and, 
as tresson — flory and counter-flory — the grape, 
vert and gules. 

But with new thought let the transplanted 
branch do honor to the ancestral tree. In the 
veins of the Homesteader's children may flow the 
blood of Knights and Vikings. 

I turn to my books. What a comfort they are 
in a place like this. Here one may still have his 
friends around him. There they stand, the glor- 
ious company ; silent, it is true, but ever ready to 
teach or amuse. In life, some of those who stand 
there so calmly, were unknown to each other, or 
they lived, perhaps, as enemies. But now they 
are friendly enough. There are "the true peace 
society — heretic and orthodox." Side by side, 
they keep truce in their work of ministry. Some 
of those great ones wrought in solitude; some 
achieved their work amid the plaudits of an ad- 
miring world. Others, though they may have 
known it not, nor guessed what lay in the course 
of time — centuries, customs, evolutions, holding 



38 OUR INLAND SEA. 

them apart — seem destined now to be linked as 
twin stars, or to shine in clusters, as Dante has 
grouped them in the world of shades. 

Who can tell where the written words shall 
be read? A singular place, this lonely and des- 
olate rock, in which to pursue the thoughts o£ the 
men who once trod the classic vales of Hellas, or 
to follow the lines of those who graced the court 
of Queen Bess ! Within reach of my hand are the 
best productions of the human mind — the work 
of the individual condensing the thought of the 
race. Of what august times they make one a citi- 
zen! I have to but stretch forth my arm to an- 
nihilate space and to roll back the ages. Those of 
the Book, ^schylus, Euripides, Musaeus, ^sop, 
the blind old man of Scios, and the voices of the 
other immortals, I hear. 

On the table lie a few de lux. There are the 
Decameron; the Lyrics — Beranger, — the Kele- 
vala, Herrick's Hesperides and Noble Numbers, 
the Siegfried's Saga of Tegner, and Walt Whit- 
man's Leaves of Grass. 

And among them at the moment, like pilgrims 



OUR INLAND SEA. 39 

who have lost their way, Architecture of the 
Heavens, by Nichol, and Lives of the most emi- 
nent Painters and Sculptors of the Order of St. 
Dominic. 

Yes, I turn to my books. There, for my mood, 
are Caesar and Kepler, Gladstone, Webster and 
Paine. There are Don Quixote and the story of 
Faust. From Odyssey and Iliad, from the Roman 
iEnead, I can turn to Shakespeare and the Med- 
iaeval Song. When wearied by the great Ver- 
alum, there is the bright Montaine. There are 
Josephus and Augustine, Rabelais and Swift. 
When too much moved by the thought of Omar, 
the passion of Poe, there are the laughing mor- 
alities of Ingoldsby Legends. But, as with Bar- 
ham, I am best pleased in the end with the sol- 
emn tones of the "As I Laye — A Thinkynge," so 
at last, with Hood, I leave the mirthful or caus- 
tic satire, to follow the bitter pathos of "The 
Bridge of Sighs," or the self-probing stanzas of 
"The Haunted House." 

Of spectres, however, the Inland Sea has one 
of its own. Not one self-conjured, but one ^b 



40 OUR INLAND SEA. 

extra* It is the grave-digger Jean Baptiste. 
Branded and shackled, the man, himself, was 
once kept, a solitary prisoner, on one of these 
neighboring islands. He attempted escape. By 
one of the river mouths, a skeleton was lately 
exhumed — a fetter and a link of chain were still 
on his ankle bone. It was the remains of Jean 
Baptiste. He had met his death by drowning. 



WILD AND WINDY MARCH. 



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III 

WILD AND WINDY MARCH. 

PRESTO! The island is changed. This 
might be the work of an enchanter's wand. 
For many days mankind and I have been 
strangers, but, lo ! society has come to my door. 
This rock once so desert has become a hive. The 
gloomy season is ended. I am lost in news of the 
world. Though welcome at this ultima Thale is 
the turn of the year, more welcome indeed are 
these human voices. 
There is a plenitude of shipping. Never be- 

43 



44 OUR INLAND SEA. 

fore has this port seen the like. In addition to 
the yacht, which arrived this noon-day with a wet 
deck and a tired crew, a fifty-foot schooner rides 
out in the bay. Another craft, too, is anchored 
close by, and to complete the surprise, besides 
these strange boats, a little sloop has parted her 
cable and lies half-wrecked on the island sands. 
Dragged up the beach, alongside of my Hope, is 
her broken yawl. 

Suddenly this island has become important. 
Short the time, since for the asking alone, the 
place had been mine. Now, as if it had become 
an actual beehive, a monster and animated em- 
blem of the state. Science, Commerce, Agricul- 
ture, 'EducBXion/*Ars Militans/* I might add, 
are contending for it. Uncared for these thou- 
sands of years, no sooner would I call this Home, 
than there comes this change. So many the 
changes, that I scarcely have time to note them. 

Here is the case : the corporation, with its mil- 
lions of dollars, the private company, the indi- 
vidual, the state, each makes a claim. There have 
been Government surveys, railroad section sur- 



OUR INLAND SEA. 45 

veys, local company and private surveys. There 
have been issued a Government Grant, the Des- 
ert Entry, the Homestead Entry, and the Mineral 
Claim. A coveted prize this island must certainly 
be. 

Never before have such diverse accents of 
tongue fallen on these gray, old stones. Amer- 
ica, the United Kingdom, Scandinavia, the Land 
of the Teuton — these send their number. Here 
we see that sudden progress that roots up pri- 
meval trees, to make place for the school-house, 
or even a gallery of art. Commerce, while I ter- 
race my slopes and watch my vines, will sweep 
with its besom these nested rocks. Out yonder 
the workman, busy with pick and shovel, with 
tripod and line, all proclaim a desire. The ques- 
tion is — for what? 

From this time on, my hermitage will be of a 
temperate kind. The new-comers — the perma- 
nent ones — and I, will live on most friendly 
terms. Not a hundred rods from my own, the 
sifters have made for themselves a home. It is 



46 OUR INLAND SEA. 

long and narrow, and is built of rounded slabs. 
Within this cabin, the piled-up sacks of flour, the 
bags of beans, the boxes of candles, the flitches of 
bacon that hang from the beams, the pots, pans 
and kettles, as well as the many aids and imple- 
ments of labor, indicate that the men will make 
a protracted stay. 

In more ways than one, I am pleased with my 
new companions. Mutual esteem and confidence, 
or a dislike amounting even to animosity, one or 
the other, must be our attitude. Among a num- 
ber of men thus thrown together, there is hardly 
room for indifference. Here the Divine Right of 
Kings, as it were, and the Vox populi, are, in a 
way, united. We are here to fight this wild na- 
ture or to be assisted by it. We are here to de- 
rive the benefit given by co-operation, or assert 
our individuality. We may gather strength from 
such of the past as we can assimilate to our time 
and environments and can reject the other. We 
hope to rise superior to the mistakes of a bygone 
age, and to assert ourselves as men. "The arts 
which flourish," says Bacon, "when virtue is in 



OUR INLAND SEA. 47 

the ascendant, are military; when virtue is in 
state, are liberal, and when virtue is in decline are 
voluptuous." Judged by these obvious truths— 
of the past at least— the island now presents a 
paradox. Here we have a state, a common- 
wealth, or whatever we may choose to call it, in 
which are exhibited the three stages of virtue, 
not separate and alone, but working in concert. 
Those latest comers, both the sifters and I, al- 
though we come here with widely divergent 
thought, are alike in this— we represent the time. 

Human beings are but figures to the landscape 
painter. Often from that standpoint— as a 
sketcher— I look at these men. Man was needed 
to give human interest to these waves and stones, 
and now he is here. This island, as it existed in 
solitude, was complete. It was in its way a per- 
fect thing. Now that former completeness is 
broken and gone, and there is that process going 
forward by which a new one will take its place. 
The figures, the sifters, accentuate these island 
scenes. That is, they do so through suggestion. 



48 OUR INLAND SEA. 

They are as much in harmony, too, with these 
bird-haunted rocks, as are the samphire-gather- 
ers to the old world cliffs. Emphasis they give 
to these scenes, such as the landscape painter 
lOves. 

Take the present moment: The storm of the 
Vernal Equinox which tore the sloop from her 
fastenings and still strews the beach with huge 
globes of foam, has partially cleared. Three of 
the sifters are engaged in the task of passing 
guano-dust through sieves, and putting it into 
sacks, whilst others dig among the ancient bird- 
deposits. Leaning against the wild March wind, 
their rustic clothing flapping in as wild disorder, 
and a cloud of brown, snuff-like mineral hovering 
around them, or being carried by the fitful gusts, 
far beyond the sieves, the men make extremely 
picturesque figures. One of the sifters will dwell 
here permanently, and I expect to put him into 
many a sketch. He is a Hercules in strength and 
of brawny stature. He moves from place to place 
all unconscious, as of course uncaring, of his pic- 
torial value to me. In spite of the season, and 



OUR INLAND SEA. 49 

the kind of day, his head is bared to sun and 
wind ; his feet are encased in coarse, brown sack- 
ing, and, as I write, he is, with that exception, 
naked. He is carrying a plank to two of his fel- 
low laborers, and these latter men are at work 
on the recently stranded boat. The man's yellow 
hair, his ruddy fiesh-tints, his athletic form, focus 
a natural picture in which the broken sloop, the 
big, black schooner, the white hull of the yacht, 
the blue waters of the Inland Sea, the warm, 
gray tones of the island cliffs, with the reeling 
clouds above them, are the splendid components. 
Only to realize the effects of this momentary 
scene upon the beholder, he who describes it, 
must not omit the sounds. Besides the wild 
noise of the wind and waves, there is the clatter- 
ing of hammers made by the workmen over-haul- 
ing the wreck. Devil makes himself heard, the 
dogs yelp, and these united noises bring shrill, 
harsh, cries from the island birds. These are an- 
swered by a loud and indignant cackle from the 
sifters' score and two of newly-brought and as- 
tonished barn-yard fowls. 



REDEEMING THE WASTE. 




IV 

REDEEMING THE WASTE. 

WHAT a surprise it might be to us, could 
we but sometimes read the thoughts of 
our fellow men. Stranger than that, it 
may be, could one but know the impression 
wrought upon the comprehensions of the lower 
animals. Cosmopolitan, surely, is the group of 
men that is here — but the other life ? Among the 
sifters, one is a Pole and another a Russian. One 
of the Englishmen has sailed on St. George's 
Channel, and been to the guano-islands off the 
Coast of Brazil. One has doubled the Capes, and 
crossed the waves of the German Ocean, and still 
another has seen the palms of the Hawaiian Isl- 

53 



54 OUR INLAND SEA. 

ands, and the smoking crater of Mauna Loa. And 
this is besides a Scotchman who talks of the Med- 
iterranean as well as of Arthur's Seat. There is 
my man, too, "the Drudge." He has watched for 
weary months on the mountain tops. The im- 
pression made by these men upon each other 
must be varied indeed. But more varied it must 
be among the animeils. 

But what thought Devil? It has been but an 
armed truce, as it were, that has existed these 
months between the bird and my dogs. The raven 
has been ever alert, nor are the dogs at their ease 
in the presence of Devil. With an air of suspi- 
cion, he looked askance at the new arrivals. The 
domestic fowls, in their turn, received an impres- 
sion. Whatever that impression was, it taught 
them, at least, a profound respect for the raven. 

The sifters are prompt. Already the pits and 
trenches, the numerous outworks make their part 
of the island appear like a fortified camp. "Veni, 
vidi, vici!" as one voice they might exclaim. 
As for me, although a believer with Socrates, "a 



OUR INLAND SEA. 55 

man may live in a cabbage-garden and dream of 
Paradise," better would it be for me could I make 
the boast of the Roman.* 

See how it stands. It is easier to gather than it 
is to create. The sifters, wise men, profit them- 
selves by things of the past ; while my reward, if 
any, is to be the result of things to be. I repre- 
sent the material side of things, also. But with a 
difference. "Circumstances and the animal wants 
of man," are represented by my labors on the soil. 
But there is the higher purpose. 

My vineyard follows the island lines. It is high 
above the present beach. I have taken advantage 
of the narrow flats, those that mark a pause in 
the shrinkage of ancient Bonneville. On the 
nearest slope and along the flats, the posts and 
trellis stand. Here are stones enough and to 

*I still call the island mine, although, strictly speaking, 
I should but claim a portion. Of a total area of 155.06 
acres, my Homestead Entry covered 78.35 acres, the re- 
maining part being divided between a railway grant and 
a State School Section. The Northern part of the isl- 
and — mine — is the one that is grand with cliff and bay. 
The State School Section — 7.50 acres, comprise a low 
promontory; great blocks of stone and wave-washed 
boulders. 



56 OUR INLAND SEA. 

spare, and of these I have built my retaining 
walls. The August sun will bake these rocks, 
and, as I have already seen, the snows of winter 
drift over them. But I shall see more. Grapes, 
most excellent grapes, have been grown on yon- 
der mainland. Like the blast of a trumpet may 
sound the wind; it may howl round my hut, but 
so, I know, it does there. There the trellis is 
built and there the vine is set. Over that alluvial 
soil, the grapes have hung thick. While from 
season to season, the blue-furred berries of the 
native dwarf, ripened amid its prickly leaves, the 
alien plants grew big and strong. Would that 
these cuttings might do as well. 

Let me profit by the wisdom of others. This 
may be a question of will. Then let me endure. 
Perhaps this is a game of patience, and my part is 
but to watch and to wait. A work of redemption 
is a work that proves slow, yet did one but know 
that labor must always meet with its sure success 
then what brave thoughts we might have of the 
future. As to whether one shall play a part in 
the beginning or ending of empire, a thousand 



OUR INLAND SEA. 57 

miles of distance may be the same as a thousand 
years of time. A Homesteader's vines, Uke a 
Homesteader's heart, must be filled with cour- 
age. 

From many lands, then, have come these men. 
And from many lands have come my vines. In 
the widest meaning, this guano-dust is scattered 
to the winds of heaven, but long will it be before 
my vineyard shall be accomplished. My plants 
are here to take root in an untried soil, and to 
brave the rigors of this island climate. Some- 
what lost the transplanted vines must feel ; exiles 
without hope of return. For these vines it must 
be victory or it must be death. 

From my father I have inherited these — a love 
for an island and a love for the vine. Two good 
reasons, it appears to me, why, in the present 
venture, I may hope to succeed. 

Perhaps one may possess a genius for the rais- 
ing of vines and the making of wine. If so, then 
I think that my father possessed that genius. On 
a plot containing one hundred square rods of 
ground, the variety and weight of grapes that he 



58 OUR INLAND SEA. 

brought to perfection, was quite remarkable. He 
conquered into a generous wine the juice of the 
wild grape, and here, I think, would have forced 
this soil to his will and triumphed where I may 
fail. 

Water must be made to bubble from amid 
these stones. Without water where is my chance 
of success? Water, water, or poor starvlings my 
grapes will be! O for the smallest stream, the 
most unnoticed rivulet on yonder Wasatch! 
With the means of irrigation, my task which will 
be so difficult, would be made quite easy. Salt 
and draught are my vineyard's foes, and to keep 
alive the vines which my hand has planted, how 
many gallons of water has been carried from the 
rain-filled tanks? To assure a continuance of life 
in these now healthy plants, I must probe into 
the earth. 

Currents of fresh water continue to flow, it is 
believed, under the hardpan beneath this sea. 
Can I reach one of those? There is a flowing 
well on Fremont Island, and a natural spring on 
Church. But the latter island is high and the 



OUR INLAND SEA. 59 

water seeps from its hills. I know not yet what 
lies beneath these rocks. 

As bread cast upon the waters, I have planted 
these vines. May these rocks yet be christened 
with their own yielding of wine; may they re- 
spond in echo, to the laughter of woman and 
children ! Can the will accomplish — then it shall 
be so. 



SNOW- WAVES AND FLOWERS. 




SNOW- WAVES AND FLOWERS. 



THE Hanging Gardens are in my thought. 
As did the work of Nebuchadnezzar, my 
vineyard has resulted from love. Unlike 
the Median queen, however, one need not here 
sigh for a glimpse of the wooded hills. Soon, on 
yonder heights, will be hanging-gardens of na- 
ture's own. I trust, too, that not through pride, 
shall I be brought to the eating of grass as was 
the great Chaldasn King. 

St. Augustine enjoyed his laugh. The learned 
confessor showed that over two hundred deities 
— of Pagan mythology — would be necessary to 

63 



64 OUR INLAND SEA. 

the creation of a flower. He describes, too, eleven 
gods or goddesses who presided over the birth of 
corn. How many of the Pagan gods, then, were 
necessary to the growth of the vine? 

"Behold a sower went forth to sow;" "And 
now also the axe shall be laid at the roots of the 
tree," "Those who go down to the sea in ships." 
Unexpectedly, by the sloop's mishap, I look upon 
one of those scriptural subjects to sketch. Two, 
however, of those distinctive happenings of 
March, I shall not witness — the felling of tim- 
ber, the sowing of the soil. I may exercise a 
faith in the setting of vines, but here no tree 
makes ready to burst into leaf; in this rocky soil 
reposes no seed of food-bearing grasses. Skirt 
my island as often as I will, I shall not look on 
such things as these. Let the winds of the Vernal 
Equinox drive the waves never so fiercely, they 
but leave bare these rocks and rsands without 
casting up either weed or shell, or ever those 
heaps of kemp and tangle so dear, elsewhere, to 
the sketcher's eye. 



OUR INLAND SEA. 65 

Spring on these western plateaus, should be 

personified with a stalwart figure. A handsome 
youth, a red Sigurd, perhaps, such as I conceive 

to have been the aboriginal thought. I cannot 
imagine a Flora coming across these heights. 
Never among the Wasatch snows, do I picture 
the shivering nudity of some mountain flower- 
goddess. Spring, as it moves northward across 
the island meridian, does it find more unlikely 
soil? Upon the face of this broad land, is there 
another place more stubborn to resist its benefi- 
cent influence ? 

Carrion of some kind has drifted ashore. On 
the lesser "Cub," Devil, with his kin, is busy 
about it. His cousins, the crows, too, are making 
their claim. But what of the spring? Spring- 
time is shown in the countless white wings of 
the nest-seeking gulls. 

"A continuous residence, with the right of 
leaving for business or visiting; not for labor or 
hiring out." The latter clause, in the Rules for 
the Homesteader's Guidance, I have not broken. 



66 OUR INLAND SEA. 

nor of the first have I taken advantage. Being 
wingless, I cannot pass and repass, as do the 
gulls. The birds, however, live a life of unre- 
straint. I ever see them depart from the island 
shores, and return again, in a swift, unwearied 
flight. 

Here the gull has nested for ages. Of the In- 
land Sea, this is the most picturesque island, and 
there is not another within its bounds whose 
somber features are so enlivened with a multi- 
tude of noisy life. In the season this is the nest- 
ing ground, and the bays are then inhabited by 
crowds of screaming sea-fowl. The island, too, 
was the home of pelican and heron, but perhaps 
the presence of man will now keep these shy 
birds away. On the top of the Sarcobatus bushes 
stand huge and deserted nests. These once be- 
longed to the herons, and, where the waters of 
East and West Bays suddenly shallow upon a 
half-circle beach of oolitic sand, the homes of the 
pelicans were made. Upon Hat Island, a satellite 
of Carrington, the broad-winged birds are con- 
gregated by the scores and hundreds. They have 




■"■ M^y^'^^m 



-S^''3v-' I'M/:'' 

'' n't'M ' 



OUR INLAND SEA. 67 

found a new place of abode ; but not so the gulls. 
Now that man has come the smaller but more 
valiant birds appear little disposed as formerly to 
give up their natural rights. 

In the village orchards, the trees — the peach, 
the plum, the apple and the pear — are covering 
their branches with clouds of predictive bloom, 
and there the island gulls are disputing with the 
blackbirds for spoil in the wake of the plow. 

On yonder heights how beauteous will be the 
season's prime ! There will be great star-dashes, 
circles, and wavering belts of brilliant flowers. 
All the orders of the mountain flowers will be 
there. The heights will know Ranunculus, Sax- 
ifraga, Primula, Rosacae, Felices and Lycopodi-^ 
aceae. Along the bench-land of old Lake Bonne- 
ville will open the spotted Sego, and that great,, 
white primrose which the unlettered call the 
mountain-lily. On the Wasatch will be troops of 
Pentstemons, the Mimulus, Phlox, Aconite, Col- 
umbines, Asters, geraniums, forget-me-nots, 
Merthentias. There also will be Pedicularis, the 



68 OUR INLAND SEA. 

stone-crop, Clematis and wall-flower. There 
will be orchids, Ivesia. By the well-heads of the 
stream will grow Parry's Primula, the shooting- 
star, and a million buttercups will carpet the un- 
even ground. 

On my island, what? Nature appears to be 
just as content, just as busy, drifting these sands, 
and so changing the shapes of the dunes, as she 
does to bring forth the endless forms of verdure. 
My vines will sprout, I hope ; a cactus or two will 
unfold their fleshy blossoms; the moss and lich- 
ens may take on a brighter hue. While the 
changing waves of flowers follow the ebbing 
waves of upper snows, the island Artemesia will 
throw out new shoots ; the grease-wood and thorn 
will thrust out spiky leaves, the salt-weed come 
up by the shore, the apoloptus tufts will mark 
each line of crevice, and the bunch-grass green 
for a while the slant of the cliffs. Here also may 
be a thistle or two ; the serrated disc of a desert 
primrose, and I may see, perchance, some hith- 
erto unknown, some pungent smelling and name- 
less flower. Hardly enough this, when one re- 



OUR INLAND SEA. 69 

members the exuberance of the season else- 
where, and longs to witness once more, the full 
miracle of the spring's return. 

Yet I have compensations. Would I have 
come, and would I remain here, did I not know 
that such would be given? I shall see the great 
phenomena of nature, although their manifesta- 
tions may be affected by local conditions. In the 
clear, dry air above the Inland Sea, the vast 
white cone of the Zodiacal light streams up over 
my island cliffs at twilight, far more brilliantly 
than I have seen it elsewhere. Like a wondrous 
torch, Venus bums amid the fading glow, and, 
unobscured by fog or mist, Orion, in golden 
splendor, sinks beyond the edge of the solitary 
desert. 

We all know of the false dawn. It is seen 
more fully in the lands of the East. Here, at the 
coming of March, was that delusive appearance 
which might fitly be termed a false Spring. A 
wind treacherous and soft, caressed the land. As 
if made of burnished silver, shone the passing 



70 OUR INLAND SEA. 

clouds. Lovely tints of pale, turquoise blue, lay- 
on the placid water, and the mountains, like vast 
crumpled foldings of cream-colored silk, stood 
shimmering along the horizon. I would have 
thought that the time was truth itself. Look 
where one would was a seeming presence of 
spring. All of this, and yet once more the wild 
March blizzards come out of the north. The salt 
spray is whirled across my island; the wet sleet 
clings to the face of the rocks; the waves break 
over the backs of those twin islets, the Cubs, and 
the foam leaps half way up the breast of the Lion 
— the great Northern Cliff. 



A CRUISE ROUND MY HOME. 




VI 

A CRUISE ROUND MY HOME. 



AFTER these many days, I have just seen my 
island. Hitherto, I have been too near. Gun- 
nison suggests the truism — "It is much eas- 
ier to descend from the whole to a part, than it is 
to ascend from a part to the whole." Like life itself, 
an island, to be rightly known, needs sometimes 
to be seen from without. It needs to fall some- 
what into the retrospect, and its parts, like events 
in a life, to be seen when not out of proportion 
through the law of perspective. To appreciate 

73 



74 OUR INLAND SEA. 

this place, as a piece of rude and sterile, yet at 
the same time, attractive scenery, one should 
view it from a boat's deck, and at a considerable 
distance from its shores. 

A rude and unarranged mass — that the Gun- 
nison certainly is. But from the water it is 
something more. It is a rock, a rising of the par- 
tially submerged Desert Range of Mountains; 
a summit of black limestone with longitudinal 
traversements of coarse conglomerate. Parts of 
the island are low, its mean height, something 
like a hundred feet, but at its northern end it 
stands two hundred, eighty-four feet above the 
surrounding sea. Three miles would probably 
exceed the length of its shore line, yet five min- 
ature bays indent its irregular plan. Seen from 
the south, its mass assumes most symmetrical 
proportions. Square, rocky headlands, bulwarks 
at either end, are joined by a low flat causeway, 
over which one sees, pyramidal in shape, the 
main peak of the island. On a limited scale, it 
has beetling cliffs, sandy beaches, walls, mounds, 
old molars of rock, fantastic forms innumerable. 



OUR INLAND SEA. 75 

One might believe that the Gunnison was de- 
signed to show the wild and stern in the pictur- 
esque. 

A couchant lion; such is the outline of the 
Northern Cliff. Though the outlines of Stans- 
bury's and Church Islands are quite of the 
grandest, and these two islands are much larger 
and higher, in the boldness of its skyline, Gunni- 
son exceeds them both. As one approaches the 
upper end of Gunnison Island, going from west 
to east, there lies the beast. His massive head is 
turned eastward, his monstrous paws rest on the 
lower shelves. Below him the water is deep, and, 
today, is richly blue. The islets, called the 
"Cubs" and joined just below the surface of the 
sea, to the main island by a projection of the 
living rock, add materially to the wildness of the 
surrounding scene. Under the gloomy heights 
of the Northern Cliff, and between the islets, we 
ran our yacht. As we startled the birds with our 
repeated shouts, from the stony breast of the 
watching monolith, the sound of our voices came 
back in far-heard echoes. 



76 OUR INLAND SEA. 

Here Ruskin would live in dolor. Hardly could 
the "Art Seer" be expected to comprehend the 
love that might come to one through the exer- 
cise of those two most American of American 
privileges — the Homestead Entry and the Squat- 
ter's Right. Yet this place is. On such a spot as 
Gunnison burns "The Lamp of Truth," if not "The 
Lamp of Memory." The homesteader and the 
squatter, they, more than another, should look to 
the future. Up in the Hidden Valley grew flow- 
ers the like of which, for endless generations, 
have been dear to the old world heart and brain. 
And others, too, that had bloomed upon the self- 
same spots, century beyond century of the past, 
unseen by human eyes. The aconite recalled the 
skill of old -ffisculapius, the sun-disk of Helian- 
thus, the worship of Phoebus Apollo ; the crane's 
bill reminded one of the cloak of Mahomet; a 
Brodia — Star of Bethlehem — brought to mind 
the wonder of Christ's nativity; and there, too. 
Ranunculus Navalis — like a tiny Passion Flower 
— suggested Gethsemane Garden and Calvary 
Hill. Here on Gunnison the ancient sage recalls 



OUR INLAND SEA. 77 

great Artemis; and the planets and constella- 
tions, as they roll overhead, bring with them a 
presence of the heathen gods and Him of Holy 
Writ. This the new world owes to the old ; but 
amid this newness of thought and action, as upon 
the mountain heights, there burns a lamp, and 
one of clearest flame. This is one not included 
among the Seven of Architecture — The Lamp of 
Hope. 

And while the scenery to landward had kept 
our attention, th?re was, across the wide reaches 
of moving waters, ever-shifting panoramas of is - 
lands and mountains, but never once was there 
the flash of a rival sail. From the beginning to 
the end of our cruise, not a sign of life met our 
gaze. The island huts, a group of sifters, came 
almost as a surprise after the lonely seascape 
and otherwise deserted shores. 

The sun fell. In the east the dead moon came 
up, and stared like a ghost at the acrid waters of 
a dead sea. Girding the far horizon, the western 
mountains appeared like the outermost land of 



78 OUR INLAND SEA. 

earth resting on molten gold. The Dome of Ma- 
lad, the old city — the turret-like squares, the 
broken walls of the denuded rocks on the desert 
rim — were consumed in fire. When the sun 
touched the verge, it was as though one looked 
into a furnace of ruby flame. On the western 
front of the great Northern Cliff, and on the 
wings of the gulls that soared so high, the 
strange light rested. 

"Behold the fowls of the air ; for they sow not 
Neither do they reap, nor gather into bams." 

Not inappropriate either, as we passed beneath 
that ruin — that pile of nature's upbuilding — 
seemed the words of the prophet: 

"But the cormorant and the bittern shall pos- 
sess it ; the owl also, and the raven shall dwell in 
it; and He shall stretch out upon it the line of 
confusion and the stones of emptiness." 

The Hidden Valley — I should like to describe 
that place. 



OUR INLAND SEA. 79 

Two deep canons of the Wasatch range begin 
on the sides of a central peak. Almost parallel in 
their courses, there stands between these neigh- 
boring passes, a stupendous barrier of mountain 
wall. Leading up to this, and to peaks still higher 
— set like watch-towers along its way — are wind- 
ing ridges, with knifelike edges, and overlook- 
ing deep ravines, ragged and grizzly with thick- 
set spears of fractured stone. On the north side, 
especially, the wall is exceedingly grand. From 
time to time, its already tremendous strength is 
augmented by mighty bastions, the tops of 
which, seen from the canon below, appear to be 
the crests of the peaks themselves. To be exact, 
however, there are two rows of these bastions, 
one set above and back of the other, so that be- 
hind the tops of the lower row, and the base of 
the other, at an elevation of some ten thousand 
feet, there lies a long and narrow space. This is 
the Hidden Valley. As now I sometimes turn 
my glass towards the heights, so when there, 
with this samie glass, I made out amid the distant 
waters, this desert home. 



80 OUR INLAND SEA. 

A man may be known by the game that he fol- 
lows. Thus we may judge of a Columbus, a Na- 
poleon, a Cromwell; and Tyndall and Darwin. 
The Order of Things — Cosmos — these men 
knew, is everywhere to be found. The great 
games, they are easy to understand. But if one 
cannot subdue a people, he may subdue a soil; 
if he cannot discover a continent, he may dis- 
cover an island. A lake-hunt led me to the Hid- 
den Valley, and there was a double purpose in 
coming to Gunnison. One must rest content, if 
it be his fate, in achievements in a lesser scale. 

In the Hidden Valley, what pleasure has been 
mine! There I have known the explorer's zeal. 
The approach to Gunnison is across the broad 
waters, open on every side, but Hidden Valley 
has a secret entrance. Its narrow door-way — at 
the top of a long, steep glen — is between two 
monster boulders. The heights above the Sis- 
ter Lakes, looking up the valley, are pyramidal 
in form, but looking down the valley, the reverse 
is true. The view is then bounded by dome 
forms, the interior shelves crescented, so that 



OUR INLAND SEA. 81 

some of the cliffs appear as vast flights of steps, 
each step curve-fronted. The runnels that feed 
the lakes, etch lines of ink across wastes of ice 
and snow, lave club-mossed boulders of granite, 
or storm-loosened fragments of porphyry, dizzily 
poised, or banks rainbow-tinted with mountain 
flowers. Lakes Gog and Magog, Mary and 
Martha, Lackawaxan (Glacier), Storm-Cloud, 
those around the base of Lone and Twin Peaks — 
I love them all. Above the groups is that mas- 
sive peak, that rock the first to rise, of all these 
western heights, above the waves of the pri- 
meval ocean — that purple-gray peak, that now 
looks over the canon heads, though it was once 
an island, the haunt of aquatic wild birds that 
looked at the sun through the mists of the 
world's morning. 

The Hidden Valley and this Northern Cliff 
of Gunnison are, of this land, my favorite scenes. 



THE TWENTY-FIRST OF JUNE. 







■K' 



VII 
THE TWENTY-FIRST OF JUNE. 

THE twenty-first day in the Month of Roses 
— June ! Now thunders in each canon the 
mountain stream; now touches the flood- 
tide on these highest sands. Flushed with the 
colors of June, the distant mountain heights are 
beautiful in the borrowed hues of this Month of 
the Rose. 

**Tempora Mutantur/* Yes, and we change 
with them. Five years ago, I was in the Hidden 
Valley. Along the northern sides of the Sister 
Lakes, the terra-cotta ledges were clear of snow, 

85 



86 OUR INLAND SEA. 

but a mass, the depth o£ which one could hardly 
guess, still lay by the mighty wall. On the 
hearth-stone of the cabin, which my (to me pre- 
historic) friends had left, I laid great logs. The 
deserted room was damp and mouldy. Ferns 
grew between the unadzed timbers, and the fal- 
len pine-cones sprouted on the unused pathway. 
On that Mid-summer Day, the strip of untrod- 
den meadow in front of the cabin was intense in 
greenness, and forget-me-nots made its surface 
beautiful as the Elysian Fields. In all the wild 
disorder there was still an order. Not yet the 
Monk's-hood had bloomed, but in the upper 
glen made ready troops of the solemn yet beau- 
tiful flower. Thousands of purple asters waited 
by the lakes. The Pentstemons were already 
like azure clouds, and on the heights the lesser 
flowers, too (P. humilis) clustered like gems on 
the glacier rocks. Sweet, at dawn, from grass- 
hidden larks, came bubbles of melodious sound. 
Among the groves the hermit-thrush and the 
purple-finch uttered their soft love-warblings and 
tender calls, and, in the gloaming, as Hesperus 



OUR INLAND SEA. 87 

hung above the craggy walls, the Vesper-spar- 
row sung its tuneful song. Ah, the unstained 
granite, the pallid snow-banks, weeping, drop by 
drop, into the lake's translucent depths ! O, how 
hushed and fragrant the aisles among the pines ! 
Below the snow-line, the slopes were fairly aglit- 
ter with a thousand rills. High above one's head, 
all that could be seen, perhaps, of a mile of hur- 
rying water, were flashings as of a fall of dia- 
monds. On another declevity could be seen a 
succession of snowy and miniature cataracts. 

With the winds from the heights, there came 
a soothing sound, almost like the hum of bees. 

**SalmoferfO,(_the common trout)." That, per- 
haps, of my work was the best. To carry, in a 
large tin pail, and up a steep and broken trail, a 
score or more of the live infant fish, and from 
the lowest mountain lake, deposit them in one 
much higher, was no easy task. Perhaps it was 
an act that was also commendable. This was be- 
fore I dwelt in the cabin, and the transplanted 
fish, while I journeyed here and there, forgetting 



88 OUR INLAND SEA. 

them quite, have lived and thriven. Once, at the 
upper lakes, never a ripple from a fish jump, 
broke the glassy stillness of the mountain mir- 
rors. Then the lower bodies of water swarmed 
with innumerable trout, but now the reverse is 
true. The lower lakes are almost depopulated. 
Of late, trout weighing four pounds have been 
taken from the higher waters, and, although I 
have never cast line or net there, the flesh of 
those fish — in imagination — has been sweet in 
my mouth. 

So changes come. On Alpine pastures, where 
fed the herds of wary deer, is now the flock of 
sheep. The savage grizzly gave place to the 
peaceful cow. Already the nomadic ruminant 
has climbed the Wasatch glen, and found the 
Hidden Valley. Soon is superceded the native 
denizen of the wild. In the Hidden Valley, who- 
soever my predecessors were, they were, at least, 
the pioneers. They may have been loggers ; min- 
ers, perhaps. A saw-mill in the canon beneath, 
the remains of a slippery wood track, would seem 
to say the first; but those holes, those burrows. 



i 



\' 



Z'^.v, 



•«^iS;- 






il^^S%4^^ 



^'/•^;? 




















OUR INLAND SEA. 89 

where, with weapons of steel and blast of pow- 
der, men had broken into the stubborn rock, 
would seem to say the second. Be that as it may, 
pioneers were the trout. Transplanted a thous- 
and feet or more above their native haunt, the 
enforced fish-emigrants, however, were more at 
home in that aforetime tenantless lake, than are 
now these domestic fowls brought to this island, 
and beginning to struggle at odds against the 
native sea-birds of the wild. 

The American is the most strenuous of men. 
In his practicality, he is the most tolerant, we 
may say, of the ugly. Little time has he for the 
merely aesthetic. And yet, often under his busy 
life, there is hidden a true vein of the deeply po- 
etic. That the poetry of nature can be ; or rather 
was, felt by those who lived closest to it, wit- 
nessed the American red-man. The Arapahoe 
and Sioux, with all their Eastern brothers are 
gone, but the Zuni and the Apache remain. The 
latter amid the mesas of his sun-scorched land, 
is ever keen to the desert beauty. And I have 
conversed with him too often, not to know the 



90 OUR INLAND SEA. 

appreciation o£ the cow-boy, and the pride in his 
surroundings of the pioneer. 

Which be the more solemn, which be the more 
beautiful, I do not know! Once I watched the 
mid-summer moonlight in the Hidden Valley. To 
see the vast basin of Lake Blanche — as the crim- 
son alpen gild ebbed from off the Wasatch — 
flooded with a greenish light was a wondrous 
spectacle. So, too, was the moving shadow of 
the mighty gnomon — a jut of quartzite, five hun- 
dred feet in height — that measured the passing 
hours as on a lunar dial. An aged cedar that stands 
on the high ledge of Lake Florence, gave to those 
central waters, as the moon glinted through the 
outstretched branches, and illumined a foamy cas- 
cade, a peculiar interest. On the shore of Lake 
Lillian lies a monster boulder. Square, purple- 
black in hue, metallic-hard, glacier-brought to the 
place of its present rest, and ice-scratched, too, it 
holds legends of frost and fire. Strange, from that 
Wasatch stone, to see the light of the orb on the 
giant walls, the silent woods, the sleeping lakes ! 



OUR INLAND SEA. 91 

Now I watch the luminosity, the moon laying a 
pathway across the lonely and midnight wave. 
And the moonlight is rare. If ever in man- 
hood's strength, one could bring back his child- 
hood's belief in enchanted valleys and magic isl- 
ands, it would be in such a valley as that in yon 
Wasatch, or on such an island as this. All around 
is crystalline pure. The island peak, and even the 
nearer rocks appear cerulean. The slopes and 
ridges, the sleeping water, the far-off moun- 
tains themselves, are wrapped in tender blue. 
And through earth's shadow-cone, are shot the 
moon rays of ruddy gold. 

Dig, ye men of muscle; toss the brown bird- 
dust through the iron sieves ! This is the Month 
of the Rose. Not of roses do the sifters dream ; 
they think not of roses, neither those of the gar- 
den, nor those of the mountains. But I know a 
path where the garden roses cluster, and on the 
heights, by the side of Rose-Malva, the wild- 
rose is queen. The quarryman knows not into 
what forms of beauty the marble he loosens may 



92 OUR INLAND SEA. 

be carved, nor do the sifters, good men, think 
into what future forms of loveliness the mineral 
they dig may be turned. Yet, dig, there is poetry 
in the ancient stuff ! This gift of the long ago, a 
million roses of the future may make more fair. 



UNDER THE DOG-STAR. 




VIII. 
UNDER THE DOG-STAR. 

MY days of trial are here. The King of 
Suns, the mighty Sirius, the fiery Dog- 
Star of the ancients, rules the sky. My 
eyes ache. O, the insufferable brightness! O,. 
the glare of light upon the waters of the Inland 
Sea! Like polished steel gleams the briny sur- 
face; and across it, the sun's path is like that 
same steel at molten heat. My brain seethes. 
Through the smallest aperture, sun-arrows pierce 
into the darkened room. In the tanks the water 

95 



96 OUR INLAND SEA. 

keeps pure, but too quickly it shrinks away. 
These are the days when the temper becomes un- 
certain, when indolence and passion hold equal 
sway. Now the heat of that distant star gathers 
in the veins and the blood boils. We are made 
the playthings of combustion taking place innu- 
merable miles away. Now the poet's eye is in 
a fine frenzy rolling ; the musician hears the mu- 
sic of the spheres. Now men of nobleness en 
rapport with steller fires, are moved to great 
achievements, or those of lower instincts are 
moved to deeds of crime. Now, when too bit- 
ter the wormwood in the cup of sorrow, one must 
cry out like John in the wilderness, or the deli- 
cate brain gives way to madness in the fierce 
disquiet of the time. 

"The heart-sick," says Poe, "avoid distant pros- 
pects. In looking from the summit of a moun- 
tain one cannot help feeling abroad in the world. 
Grandeur in any of its moods, especially in that 
of extent, startles, excites — and then fatigues. 
For the occasional scene, nothing can be better 
— for the constant view — nothing can be worse. 



OUR INLAND SEA. 97 

And in the constant view, the objectional phase 
of grandeur is that of extent, the worst phase of 
extent that of distance." 

The words of Poe are true. Unless I fear not 
to invite the pain of dejection, I keep away from 
the peak. I have discovered for myself that on 
the summit of the cliff, I cannot escape from the 
feeling "abroad," of which the poet speaks. Not 
only is dejection there invited, but also is added 
thereto, the irony, as it were, of publicity. 
Strange to relate, the farther I see away from 
my place of exile, the more unhappy I become. 
Melancholy, impossible to turn aside, steals over 
me at sight of those vast stretches of briny wa- 
ters and those endless miles of arid land. 

In the brooding, mid-day calms, too, the sad- 
dening nature of my surroundings is most strong- 
ly felt. Yet it is not the character merely of the 
sea and landscape that works a depression, its 
causes take a deeper root in the soul. Perhaps, 
too, I have reached the stage in my island life 
when what was a stimulant gives place to an- 
tipathy. As I stand in the crow's nest, erected 



98 OUR INLAND SEA. 

by Stansbury, my island lies around me like a 
map in relief. Beyond the waters are the end- 
less mountains; beyond the mountains the open 
sky. There are mountains near and mountains 
distant. There is limitless recurrence of slope 
and peak and gorge. Range behind range, the 
heights culminate in dreary levels, in curve and 
dome, or in jagged saw-tooth edges along the 
horizon. A hundred miles of the Wasatch 
Mountains occupy but a fragment of the vast cir- 
cumference. There gape the canons, there are 
a hundred wan and nameless ravines leading into 
the inmost recesses of the stony hills. Tremu- 
lous through heat-haze shows the receding white 
of the Western Desert. There are low, rocky 
hills, flat-topped and sable, the old broken cliff- 
lines of ancient Bonneville ; and there, too, far to 
the south, the level escarpments of vanished La 
Hontan. Vastness and strangeness are the lead- 
ing features of the tremendous landscape, and 
worse than those to the mind, are the powers of 
memory and assimilation. To the inner eye, this 
enlarges the horizon a hundred fold. Rather than 



OUR INLAND SEA. 99 

be a slave too long to the infinite in the finite, 
one tries to concentrate his attention upon some 
petty object, to shrink into one's self, and to find 
rest for a moment in anchoring the mind to some 
near rock or shrub. But all in vain. Instinctively, 
as through a resistless fascination, the gaze wan- 
ders once more. No rest, no ceasing. Again one 
looks, around and around, across and across the 
unfriendly waters. At last, against all efforts of 
will, a plunge into the deep, the alluring and 
dreadful blue. 

Bird-voices grow monotonous. I am berated 
from morning to night. The gulls scream de- 
fiance. In every nook and corner of this disputed 
island, go where I will, the untired birds greet 
my presence with cries of resentment. Not con- 
tent with this, they await not my coming, but 
come themselves to my very door. There they 
utter their querulous and insulting notes. It is 
painful to be so very unpopular. The sifters and 
I — we act the part of usurpers. Truly the island 
belongs to the gulls by right of inheritance. They 



100 OUR INLAND SEA. 

are the original possessors. Then why should 
they not give us the words of ejectment? 

"Thanks. What's the matter, you dissentious 
rogues?" 

Are your throats never weary? Why watch you 
my every action? I am not the keeper in the 
limbo for birds. The creatures are not unmindful 
of favors; they dash for whatever bits of food 
may come from my table. But they love me, 
trust me, alas ! none the more. 

Do gulls never sleep? For the third part of a 
year now, I have listened to their ceaseless 
clamor. Their cries greet the dawn, they fail not 
at eve, neither are they absent at the noon of 
the day, nor the mid of the night. My dogs may 
bay at the moon, the owl on the cliff may scatter 
demoniac laughter, but they cannot outnoise 
these obstreperous gulls. 

The birds are clannish; there are duels to the 
death. Then what frenzied accompaniments of 
wing-flashings and inarticulate sounds of sexual 



OUR INLAND SEA. 101 

ire. I witness, perhaps, some detail of natural 
selection. Perhaps this day's war was over some 
winged Helen, some Isolde, or it may be some 
Guinevere of the gulls. This colony, no doubt, 
is as ancient as Tyre, its laws unalterable as those 
of the Medes and Persians. Primitive order still 
holds good along its lanes and streets. Often 
the male birds may be seen in separate groups, 
and then I try to pick out whose may be the 
guiding will in this "Parlament of Fowles." Who 
is the Democratic Cincinnatus? Who is the 
lordly Agamemnon, the Ajax, Menaulus, the sage 
Ulysses, or the aged Nestor of the convocation? 
Ha!-ha! — Ha!-ha! There are those who laugh. 
Then, there must be among them, a Thersites; 
some ^sop, too. Plaintive the voices can grow. 
"H-e-l-p ! h-e-l-p !" With almost human distinct- 
ness comes at times a piercing call. In the dead 
of the night, as the wild appeal comes, now from 
one corner of the island, now from another, and 
each and every time with an intensity of sound as 
from a soul in pain; one might fancy that the 
spooks were abroad, or, as a nearer cry is fol- 



102 OUR INLAND SEA. 

lowed by a whispering, like voices suppressed in 
expectation, that some evil creature were trying 
to lure one over the edge of the cliff. But it is 
only the gulls. 

But a month since, and the downy young gulls 
were my best of friends. As I lay on the sands they 
came chirping towards me. Often has the lapel 
of my coat sheltered the little chicks and in the 
tunnels of its sleeves they crept and hid. On a 
time, they nestled in perfect confidence against 
my hand, or they cuddled my cheek, or dozed be- 
neath my hair. But now they are fearful, they 
are filled with a dark mistrust. In my presence 
they watch and cower. Or, with soft, plaintive 
cries, and faint flutter of half-formed wings, they 
run in crowds on the sand before me. When 
guided into some cul de sac of the cliffs, there is 
something uncanny in the stare of their yellow 
eyes. 

How they wheel and scream — those parent 
gulls! They put to my nocturnal wanderings a 
frightful din. Do you think I will harm them? 
Scream your loudest, if such you desire; yet, as 



OUR INLAND SEA. 103 

regards me, your progeny is safe. How like a 
white, fallen cloud, appear your hosts on the star- 
lit water! Or, indeed, as I retrace my steps to 
the hut, I could think you, as slov/ly again you 
approach the dim shore, a fleet of tiny gondolas ; 
messengers unknown from an unknown shore. 

Beauty may become so perfect that there is left 
no room for peace. There is delirium in these 
lustrous nights as well as in these torrid days. Too 
closely the shining orbs wrap one around; too 
multitudinous they reflect in the shining wave! 

There is a degree of beauty that is restful, and 
there is one that excites. "There is a nakedness 
in beauty," thought Ambrose. "Beauty may be- 
come maddening when it removes veil after veil," 
he says, "and we seem about to stand in the un- 
clothed presence." 

"Is it the climate! Is it the marvelous sky?" 
Hugo exclaim.ed so, when he learned the death of 
Count Bresson. "A brilliant and a joyous sky 
mocks us! Nature in her sad aspects resembles 
us and consoles us. Nature when radiant, im- 



104 OUR INLAND SEA. 

passive, serene, magnificent, transplendent, 
young while we grow old, smiling while we are 
sighing, superb, inaccessible, eternal, contented 
in its joyousness, has in it something oppressive." 

"People," says Amiel, "talk of the temptations 
to crime connected with darkness, but the dumb 
sense of desolation which is often the product 
of the most brilliant moments of daylight must 
not be forgotten. Man feels lost and bewildered, 
a creature forsaken by all the world." 

In the heart of these crystal days there lurks 
an awful thought. Today the same as yesterday ; 
that like the day before ; tomorrow but to carry 
forward the monotony of pain. In this guise, O 
life and beauty and infinity, you are scarcely to 
be borne ! 



A GUEST IN THE VINEYARD. 



v/' 




IX. 

A GUEST IN THE VINEYARD. 

CONCENTRATE in one creature, all that 
is ugly, all that is detestable in the sur- 
rounding desert; take the hues of the mud- 
flats, of the oozing alkali, the mottled herbage, 
the lava, the scoriae, animate it with malevolent 
and envenomed life, and there it is— the fanged 
and deadly "rattler." 

And this horror on my island, too ! Of what 
avail, then, around my homestead, this girdle of 
waters? O nature, little did I think you would 

send me this ! 

Yet all reptiles swim. Almost all snakes move 

107 



108 OUR INLAND SEA. 

through water with as much ease and rapidity as 
they move on land. Rattlesnakes, for instance, 
are much given to swimming. They cross rivers 
and wide stretches of placid water. This ex- 
plains, in connection with another fact, the pres- 
ence of the navigator among my vines. On the 
mainland, yonder, I have met the infant viper. 
That offspring of evil raised its tiny head, and 
although it might have been, as yet, unarmed 
with poison, it gave me proof indeed, and not 
unheeded, that it knew its natural weapon. 

And this monster, too, this hideous creature 
that has come to these shores, it, also, was quick 
to strike. 

This is a counter invasion. There is no mis- 
taking what this incident means. The desert re- 
taliates, it puts into operation the natural law of 
self-defense. In this presence among the vines 
there is a lesson to learn. Here is an enigma. 
Can I be "Happy among the Rattlesnakes?'* 
Can I defy that taunt, and with a full understand- 
ing, too, of its deeper meanings? 

Never in the slightest degree does my dread of 



OUR INLAND SEA. 109 

the rattler lessen. Never, be it ever so little, have 
I conquered that loathing the creature inspires. 
I have heard what all apologists have said. But 
I fear and hate it no less. Familiarity only in- 
creases my stock of abhorrence. To the mental- 
physical operation of watching the vines, this 
visitant was an awful shock ; but after my dreams 
in the hut, my communings with hope, to the 
inner senses much more so. 

Hateful enough anywhere, but doubly hateful 
that creature on my homestead grounds ! 

In such a presence, the very light of the sun 
appears to change. Nature appears to be less 
beneficient ; something more sinister and malefic ; 
something more to be feared. One seems to 
stand, with such a life before him, on the edge 
of a terrible gulf ! 

More hideous, too, it appeared to me, was that 
rattler than any I had heretofore seen. But that 
thought, of course, must have its root reaching 
to some special feeling. Twelve rattles and a 
button ; this snake was, I suppose, in the heyday 
of life. What black deeds stand to its life account? 



no OUR INLAND SEA. 

What deeds might it not have done in the fu- 
ture? Now is the rattlesnake most active; now 
is the period of its greatest muscular strength; 
in this month, it is most quick to strike, and now 
are its deadly fangs most terribly envenomed. 
Hideous in the midst of those gleaming coils, was 
that low-poised head, the cold glitter of those 
watchful eyes. Hideous was that rattle — a music 
of hell! 

I do not know if the description, in Beeton's 
Natural History, of the American wood or har- 
vest mouse can be applied to the mountain mouse 
of this land. But I think it can. The mice that 
inhabit the island, and strangely enough, too, 
unless they can live without water, must be the 
same. In color they are a reddish-brown and 
that answers, in that point, to the description of 
both species. Was the rattler in search of prey? 
Of course he was. Many such trips had prob- 
ably been made by the huge old sinner. Perhaps 
he came from off the western desert; but quite 
as likely he came from off the southern mainland. 
He may have shortened the way of the water trip 



OUR INLAND SEA. Ill 

by coming over Strong's Knob. The rodent 
thieves of the island have annoyed me greatly. 
Nothing to them is sacred. They play havoc in 
my bin, and my sketch-book has not escaped 
them. And yet, I do not like to think of the re- 
counter between the mice and the snake. The 
cliff -owl probably remains here for the same pur- 
pose as brought the rattler, but the owl's seeking 
of his natural food does not fill me with the same 
disquiet, or the same compassion for the mice, 
as does the picture of that other. 

Why? 

To lie, all but invisible, at the foot of an orch- 
ard tree, or in the dust of the village school-path, 
to coil amid the settler's corn, to sun itself upon 
the Homesteader's door-step, aye, even to creep 
below the blanket, spread upon the ground, of the 
lonely herdsman or sleeping prospector — these 
are ways of the rattler. The beaver that leaves 
a trail of white upon the darkness of a Wasatch 
lake, the gray old badgers that run, with that 
squat, stealthy motion of theirs, across the moun- 
tain debris, but add the finishing touch to a pic- 



112 OUR INLAND SEA. 

ture of solitude. To see the freshly made rents 
upon the silver bark of the trembling aspen, the 
mark of the claws of the savage grizzly, or to 
come upon its v^rallow, just deserted, in some 
t>oggy spot amid the pines, may make the heart 
beat quicker for a moment, as it will to hear that 
cry infernal which comes at twilight from the 
wild-cat's jaws. But although the rattlesnake is 
just as much a natural outcome and fitting inhab- 
itant of these deserts, I cannot but shudder at it. 
Once, on an Oquirrh summit, I met with an 
adventure with birds. A pair of eagles — the bald 
— inhabited the peak. I had crossed the lower 
slopes near Black Rock — where the warning note 
of the rattler was in my ears — and climbed the 
steeps at the northern end of the range. There 
the mountain slopes so that one may climb and 
it is clothed with woods, but, on the southern 
front, the rocks fall sheer ; there is a precipice of 
awful height. As I emerged from a grove of 
pines, suddenly the ground seemed to drop from 
beneath my feet, and while I stood for a moment 
there, bewildered, dizzy, the eagles — mindful of 



OUR INLAND SEA. 113 

the eaglets — made their attack. With wild 
screams and fiend-like working of talons, they 
dashed in my face, and all but caused my fall. 

For a moment I looked into the eyes of death. 
Incarnate, yes, incarnate! Evil is not merely 
negation. Beset by those wrathful birds, with 
that void in the earth below me, with the dread 
expectancy of falling blindly through space, to be 
crushed upon the rocks below, even that was not 
so horrible as to look into the hell-lit eyes of my 
unwelcome visitor. 

"There is in fact no evil." So says the poet. 
But the homesteader what? And this creature — 
where may be his wife and children! The in- 
stinctive action, the swiftly-hurled stone,and that 
poison-armed reptile, that heap of coils, and with 
severed head, dying amid the vines — such was 
the answer to that. 

"The Survival of the Fittest." Ah ! there the 
homesteader finds solid ground. 

Civilization, the progress of the race, implied, 
and still implies, the extinction of certain beasts 
and reptiles, no, evil is not merely negation. With 



114 OUR INLAND SEA. 

the Elemental around me, here, if anywhere, I 
may test the thought. It is but a fair hope that 
all the waste places of the earth shall yet know 
a civilization superior to any that has gone be- 
fore. But first comes the destruction of odious 
creatures. 

Soon only traditionally, will Europeans be able 
to take interest in wolf and boar hunts. As now 
in America, the buffalo hunt is a thing of the 
past, so will it soon be in Africa. Civilization ex- 
tends its bounds on every hand. As from civilized 
Europe and the British Isles, the bear has gone, 
so in this western land, his kind must go. The pi- 
oneer is sort of god. He meets the Lernaean 
hydra and the birds of Lake Stymphalis. Still 
the serpent comes out of the dragon's blood, and 
is bred in marsh and fen. The lions that prowl 
adown the palace steps of Persepolis; the vul- 
tures that perch upon the voluted columns of 
Tadmor, or the foxes that creep on the spot 
where Elis stood, these animals occupy — to civ- 
ilization — an antipodal position to that repre- 



OUR INLAND SEA. 115 

sented by the wild beasts here. In a hundred 
years from now, it is computed, the king of beasts 
will be extinct. If that be true, then the great 
bronze lions which Sir Edwin Landseer modeled 
for the monument in Trafalgar Square, are likely 
to outlast their living prototypes. And the rude 
nature-carving of this island cliff? How long 
will it last? Perhaps outlive the British civiliza- 
tion itself. Aye ! already old these thousands of 
years, it may — if greed does not blast the rock 
away — outwatch the growth and decay of this 
young giant, this awakening nation of the west- 
ern world. 

Tonight, with verse, I find that my words give 
utterance to another vein of thought. 

THE MYSTERY OF MATTER, 

I matter love for that which breathes it through, 
The palpable to sense of touch and sight, 
Filled with the beauty of the power of light, 

Substance made symbol by its form and hue. 



116 OUR INLAND SEA. 

I matter fear for that whence power it drew, 
The deadly hates that at love's being smite, 
The subtle poison that the pure can blight, 

O, rivals, meeting on life's avenue ! 

This blameless soil opposing force will sow, 
The butterfly and serpent share this clod; 

Roses and lilies, tares and thistles grow. 
Evil and good emerge from this dull sod; 

Therein we may the Prince of Darkness know, 
And who dares limit how we shall see God ! 



CONTENTS OF A CAIRN. 







CONTENTS OF A CAIRN. 



A HUMAN skull! Where, then, shall one 
tread, and not on the dust of man? These 
arid hills are but cemeteries. In these sur- 
rounding lands — Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado — 
the graveyards are found. Jurassic reptiles, 
mailed creatures of terrible power, lie there em- 
bedded. The feet of the shepherd, the hunter's 
and the cowboy's pony, have stumbled against 
great bones. The huge remains formed a feature 

119 



120 OUR INLAND SEA. 

in the desert landscape.* Around my horizons 
are lands that have been submerged in water, 
that have been earthquake shaken, and over 
which glaciers have crept in the by-gone days; 
lands that were once the bottom of ancient seas ; 
that cover the remains of forests below forests, 
and beneath whose soils there are secrets hidden. 
In Utah cairns and mounds have been lately 
opened. Remains of the dead have been found 
therein. To the south of Strong's Knob, within 
yonder mass of black limestone crags, bones, 
cave-entombed, have been brought to light. So 
ancient were they, those bones, that ere the 
smoke of the miner's blast had cleared away, 
they crumbled to dust on the cavern floor. Science 
will never know to what kind of creatures those 
bones belong, nor will it ever be able, perhaps, 
to ascribe an age to this skull. 



*This is a literal fact. In Wyoming the "finds" of fos- 
sils were so made. This was in the dry-washes, among 
those frayed, crumbled, honey-combed rocks near the 
Green River and Church Buttes country. In Colorado, the 
herdsmen had built the foundation of a shelter cabin with 
the great round vertebra of the disjointed monsters. 



OUR INLAND SEA. 121 

Eastward I see a dim range of hills. Along 
the flanks of those Wasatch spurs, there was 
once a battle fought. In the distant past, the 
dead from that aboriginal strife were buried in 
the conglomerate caves. Here, also, are to be 
found similar cave-like openings; but the relic 
came not from either of these. It was found by 
my man. On the south slope of the Northern 
Cliff, under a ledge, and at the end of my high- 
est vineyard trellis, with his mattock, the Drudge 
unearthed the skull. 

Devil has strutted over that spot, I know not 
how many times. But his sharp, prying eyes 
did not see. Under that very ledge the raven 
had made a cache, and within a few inches of the 
dome of the skull. His curiosity is not small, so 
his instinct must have been at fault. Otherwise, 
surely, he would have found the prize. 

How was the skull placed there? Bonneville's 
beating waves, rounded and polished the ledges 
of Strong's Knob, long after those creatures, 
whatever they were, had been entombed in the 



122 OUR INLAND SEA. 

hollow rock. So long had those bones been in 
that place, that the living creatures themselves 
existed and died ere Lake Bonneville fell or was. 
And the skull? Whatever its age, whatever was 
the remote period of time when its owner was a 
living man, I hardly expect, now, the bones to 
crumble. By some preservative process it has 
been made as hard as ivory, and as softly- 
browned toned as a piece of old ivory, too. 

From out those sockets, the eyes, that once 
were there, looked last — on what? Was that 
man's last glimpse of earth this surrounding 
scene? Did the Inland Sea look then, as it does 
this day? Did the mountains stand so? To the 
skull I may put the scornful command, "Say what 
ancestors were thine !" But no answer shall I get. 
No voice will come from the silent past. Little 
indeed could the owner of that piece of mortality 
have conceived of the coming race! Much less 
was his power to look forward to our day, than 
for us to look backward to his. That man was a 
fighter. Low, indeed, and flat is that cranium 
arch. It is broad at the base, and the frontal area 




8 



<3 









OUR INLAND SEA. 123 

is small and it slopes, but large and thrust for- 
ward are the supra-orbital ridges. 

What has my island known? Has it, too, been 
a battlefield? In the days gone by, it may have 
been a secret stronghold — a place of retreat. I 
have been led to believe that the native Indians 
have kept away from these islands, as they did 
from the mountain tops ; but this skull may have 
belonged to an older race, perhaps to a paleolithic 
man. 

It may be that the man was contemporary 
with those whose mummies were found in the 
room beneath the Payson Mound. His relatives 
may have planted the grain or have gathered 
the kernels which were found in that old stone 
box. If so, then this disinterred warrior would 
recognize the wheat — that wheat I mean, a kind 
hitherto unknown and which is now grown in 
many of these arid valleys from that ancient seed. 
Perhaps he was contemporary with the making 
of that earth-fort among the Oquirrh foothills. 
He may have aided in or directed the building of 



124 OUR INLAND SEA. 

that pile, that mound of oolithic sand, which 
stands a mystery on yonder plain. There are 
some strange speculations aroused by the sight of 
this skull. 

Did that human being, its owner, poison his 
arrow tips? If so, perhaps he took the poison 
from the forerunner of my unwelcome guest. He 
may have sent such another creature with a mes- 
sage to his god, as do the desert Indians to this 
very day. In life, did the man look on any such 
creature as those whose bones still project from 
the soil? 

It may be that this skull is as old as are the 
remains of that long extinct race, those people, 
which are found in the sepulchral chambers high 
among the red rocks of the San Juan — the cliff- 
dwellers in the southern part of the State. 

Here, then, was the secret — the island, al- 
though it has probably been a fort, a battle- 
ground, has also been a place of supulcher. 

As we dug amid the earth and stones, how 
surprised were we! 



OUR INLAND SEA. 125 

A short distance from the spot where the skull 
was found, we exhumed more bones. There 
were a broken scapula, a clavicle, parts of a hu- 
murus, fragments of a spinal column, but no 
more. And, unlike the skull, these bones were in 
an advanced stage of decay. 

Just below them we came upon the top of a 
slab, that covered the tomb. 

There, as it had reposed through the ages, was 
a skeleton complete. For an infinite time it must 
have lain in that narrow home. A weapon of 
stone — a huge, round battleax — lay by his side. 
Also there were many arrow-heads — of agate 
and jagged obsidian — also there were many 
round agates, which I supposed to be beads. 
Once the owner was a man of note. 

About the remains in the cave-dwellings of the 
San Juan County, archaeologists differ. What is 
their age? Those air-dried mummies may be of 
any age. Five thousand years, twenty-five thou- 
sand, the estimate ranges from one great gulf of 
time to that of another. And this memento mori, 
this island tomb ? I believe it to be as ancient as 



126 OUR INLAND SEA. 

any. Very much in the arrangements of the 
stones, the slab which formed the cover, those of 
the sides and floor, this tomb resembles the most 
ancient ones found beneath the barrows or crom- 
lechs of the old world. These remains and this 
resting-place may be older than the skeletons 
and the tombs which contain them, which are 
found in the lowest excavations below Nippur. 
It is indeed, then, an old proprietor who makes 
manifest his prior claim to my home. 

There was, I think, at one time, an entire skel- 
eton, also, in the earth above the tomb. If so, 
it must have occupied an oblique position, feet 
downward toward the slab. What caused the 
lower parts to crumble? And why did they dis- 
integrate so much more rapidly than did the 
upper? Why did we not find either ulna or ra- 
dius; a rib-bone, nor anything of the skeleton as 
low as the pelvis? And why was this — the skull 
removed so far from the rest of the bones? But 
most of all, what relationship of events, if any, 
existed between the two sets of remains? Just 
now I am likely to receive no answer. 



OUR INLAND SEA. 127 

What have we found ? Of a spear-head, similar 
to this one of mine, Russell has the following re- 
marks: "The fossils from the La Hontan basin 
(within my sight) that will be considered by both 
geologists and archaeologists as of the greatest 
interest, is a spear-head of human workmanship. 
It was associated in such a manner with the 
bones of an elephant, or mastodon, as to leave 
no doubts as to their having been buried at ap- 
proximately the same time." 

Among my curios, there lies this trio of relics : 
a spear-head, within a fraction of four inches in 
length, and made of flint ; a circular piece of stone 
— one and three-quarters inches in diameter, one 
half inch in thickness, and with a shallow central 
perforation on either side; and a most singular 
elongated piece of circular stone, two and one- 
quarter inches in length; both of the last-named 
being made of the same material — a red gray- 
stone, and highly polished. The flint came from 
a Wasatch canon, where it was found in a bank 
of the stream. The other pieces are from the 
hillside in the same vicinity, and are certainly pre- 



128 OUR INLAND SEA. 

historic. The remains we have just found, and 
the face ornaments, as I believe the pieces of 
stone to be, impress me as being equally old. 

During the excavations in Arizona, among the 
burying-places of the ancient people of the petri- 
fied forests, the evidence of old time tragedies 
were not to be mistaken. Among the orderly 
burials, were found a heap of calcined and broken 
bones. The marks of the implements used in 
cracking the bones were still traceable. It was, 
says one who describes the "find," the first ma- 
terial proof of cannibalism among the North 
American Indians. What do we see? Perhaps 
we have unearthed, in that skull and those up- 
per bones, the evidence of some dark, mysteri- 
ous rite, some cruel superstition of the long ago. 

The discoveries of the last few days have given 
me questions to ponder. 



OLD AND NEW DEATH. 




XL 

OLD AND NEW DEATH. 



"W 



HOSO sheddeth man's blood, by 
man shall his blood be shed." 

Hardly had I time to think over 
the old law and to connect it with those scenes 
of the past, than there comes this sequel — this 
deed that sprinkled new blood stains on the isl- 
and sands. 

Red-handed — . Not yet shall the miracle of 
Life give approval to my work, but upon it shall 
be stamped the seal of Death. 

O inscrutable mystery; how quickly man falls 

131 



132 OUR INLAND SEA. 

to the depths, how slowly he climbs to the 
heights ! 

Once more the law of force. Once more, the 
notes of The Grim Musician, and even in this wil- 
derness, one hears the riot of the Dance Mac- 
abre ! 

More terrible, perhaps, more ghastly, appears 
that dance to us — the moderns — than it did to 
the people of the Middle Ages. More grotesque, 
more fantastic, even, as we view it through the 
naturalist's labors. We see the human death- 
dance mingled, as it were, with that of the long 
procession, the millions of years of the lower cre- 
atures, and the death-dance of the world's, too, 
by the light of modern science. 

Everywhere is the mark of Death ; everywhere 
sounds the passing bell. Death and brute force, 
back from this hour to the act of Cain ! 

Clinging to the bones of the mammoth and the 
mastodon, I have seen the bright grains of placer- 
gold. I know not if there be any gold of prom- 
ise clinging to these old remains. Battles there 



OUR INLAND SEA. 133 

have always been; battles of many kinds. 
Through the geologic ages, with claws and 
horns, with teeth that cut and tore, the primeval 
creatures foretold the wrath of man. And still 
there is strife. "They that take the sword shall 
perish by the sword," the warning contained in 
those words is ever fulfilled. But do we move on- 
ward to a time when war shall be no more ? When 
murder shall be unknown, when the desire to kill 
shall no longer be inherent in the human race ? 

What need to look backward to the time of the 
poisoned arrow, to the age when battleax 
smashed skull and brain. The smaller ones 
among my arrow-heads — agates, not more than 
the half of an inch in length, are notched for the 
holding of poison, but do we need the like this 
day? Conformed, no doubt, were those skulls 
we have found to the conditions and needs amid 
which their owners lived. The human forehead 
has been lifted since then — 

But the brute is still in man. 

At the very sight of crime one feels himself de- 



134 OUR INLAND SEA. 

based. That which is in the individual is in the 
race. In a humble way, my island shows the ad- 
vance of the human kind. Here may be seen re- 
sults ; here may be read a history. Now comes a 
day, and as sure as the bones we have exhumed 
show our physical nearness to primitive man, so 
sure, also, the late deed of hate and rage shows 
how near we may be to him in mind. Picture- 
writing (in one of the western bays) exists on 
Promontory. Hieroglyphics of the rudest char- 
acter, adorn the cliff-fronts. But the "represen- 
tations of man, of animals and birds; the foot- 
prints and handmarks; the symbols that might 
stand for the sun or moon, together with the cir- 
cle, parallel, straight or undulating lines, the 
spots and other unintelligible characters" upon 
the Pictographic Rocks — what do they tell? 
Nothing that I, at lease, may read. As light, up- 
on the mystery of this mortuary find, there is 
nothing in those scratched or chiseled marks and 
fading colors. 

Religion began, some one has said, with the 
care of the dead. Veneration was bom, one 



OUR INLAND SEA. 135 

might add, when man first raised the mound or 
built the cairn. The records on the rocks may 
be a boast. They may tell of personal prowess, 
of tribes subdued or of warriors slain. The 
heaped up earth, the piled up stones were for 
another purpose. 

And grief? Here it has been. Perhaps there 
gathered around this unsealed tomb, some such 
primitive beings as once I saw by the Gila. Per- 
haps here, also, sounded such another chant as 
then I heard. Such shrieks and wails as came 
from those aged mourners ; those gaunt and wolf- 
eyed hags, those very dregs of a race, as, with 
withered hands, they beat upon withered breasts, 
and on their scant, white hair poured the desert 
sand. 

But what of that — the death and sepulture of 
those tons of horrid life ? What is the extinction 
of those races of creatures of mighty strength, 
those first crude thoughts in the creative power, 
compared to the death of one human being. How 
far less terrible, also, seems to us, the fierce and 
cruel rage of those products of primeval slime, 



136 OUR INLAND SEA. 

than does this act — this outburst of brutal pas- 
sion, this deed by a being who holds intelligence, 
and enshrines the soul ! 

Herbert Spencer has made a prophecy. In ten 
thousand years, emotion in the human race will 
be dead. Intellectual automata will take the place 
of emotional man. To inspire a far-off dram- 
atist, if such there be, there will be no Hamlet or 
Lear; no Juliet or Ophelia. To impress the his- 
torian there will be no voluptuary or bigot; no 
Sardanapalus or Philip II. As no Boadicea of 
Britain, there will be no Catherine of Russia, no 
Paris, no Helen — not in the future such ones as 
of the past. 

In that day, slaughter, such as probably this 
island has seen, shall be unknown. So, too, there 
shall be no Hastings, no Agincourt, no Actium, 
no Salamis. No more the clash of arms, the flow 
of blood, the light of flames. Nimrod, Xerxes, 
Belshazzar, Alexander or Caesar, shall be as im- 
possible as the petty chief who laid here. Fan- 
aticism shall bring forth not another Mahomet, 



OUR INLAND SEA. 137 

or Tamerlane, or Zingis Khan. The years will 
put as great a gulf between a Napoleon and the 
future hero, as between the Corsican and this old 
fighter of the tribes. 

And then adieu to the emotional-cyclonic, to 
the mental volcano. Adieu to such outbursts of 
ungovemed passion, as this from which we turn 
away our eyes. 



THE HARVESTS OF TIME. 




XII. 
THE HARVESTS OF TIME. 

A HEAVY judgment, it is said, awaits on 
those who covet dead men's riches. Not 
greed, however, has made me take the 
treasures of that ancient man, the weapons of 
flint and stone, the potsherds, the wealth of 
beads that now are mine. 



Anthropology, the knowledge of the palaeon- 
tologist, how little interest I have taken in these. 

141 



142 OUR INLAND SEA. 

When pacing the museums, the animal life of re- 
mote ages but engaged my eye for moments. I 
have rather avoided etnographic exhibits and I 
have looked with a sort of angry surprise at the 
huge remains of Dinosaurs, Uintatheriums, the 
Atlanto-saurus, and the diminutive or colossal 
bones of the primal horse. 

But here, ah ! here how different ! 

Here the old bones, the fossils, the remains of 
beast and man, hold fast the mind. All in keep- 
ing are these things — this time of flame, the sun- 
scorched land, the dazzling brine, the skull, the 
bones, the contents of the ancient cairn, and 
those great earth-skeletons themselves — the 
jagged vertebra of denuded mountains. 

Seventy-seven thousand pounds, that was the 
estimated living weight of a fossil saurian. That 
one, I mean, but recently exhumed , found among 
the sedimentary rocks in the Wyoming Bad 
Lands. Recent, indeed, in comparison with the 
natural graveyards of the western Lais, are the 
cemeteries of man. These desert conditions which 
prevail around me, and in the south, where the 



OUR INLAND SEA. 143 

cave-dwellers lived in the cliffs of the broken 
plateaus — the Rock-Rovers' Land — denote the 
approach of old age in our planet, but evidently 
they were the same in the infancy of the race. 
What are the vast cities where, enclosed in their 
clay coffins, sleep the dead of Ur, the catacombs 
of Rome, the charnel houses of Mount Sinai, the 
Necropolis of Thebes, or even the mummy-pits 
of Memphis? Insignificant when we think of the 
rock-tombs of this western land. 

There is no doubt that the kind of legend gives 
the true character of a place. The associations 
that take root and cling to a place are in harmony 
with its appearance. This is a truth that was 
known to the ancients as well as it is to the mod- 
erns. We see it in the Greek Drama. It is 
shown in the fables of Olympus and Parnassus; 
of the Cyclops, Prometheus and the crags of 
Caucasus, and many others. That in the differ- 
ent appearances of nature there is the legend al- 
ready made we feel as strongly in the stately 
classics, as we do in Shakespeare, and the later 



144 OUR INLAND SEA. 

writings of the modern school. And this is true, 
the ugly place suggests the ugly crime. Here, 
then, the savagery of place and the deed are one. 

"There is a size," thinks Thomas Hardy, "at 
which ghastliness begins." There are gulfs of 
time in which terror lies. Far deeper gulfs than 
those indeed to which the cairn belongs. Can 
one but shudder as he looks into the depths 
where the "Gorgons, and hydras, and Chimeras 
dire," are seen, and, to make a foreground, pri- 
meval man, scarcely less monstrous than the life 
beyond. 

Surely this land had its legends already made. 
The scenery of these deserts, the mountains and 
plains, the heaps of stone, presupposed the sav- 
age tribes. There already is whatever of ro- 
mance is in the Ute and the Zuni, the Apache and 
the dweller on the cliffs. Must the proud Cau- 
casian draw some disturbing augury from his re- 
lationship with the red, the yellow, the brown and 
the black races. Are these indeed his brothers? 
Behold the Esquimaux and the native of Terra 



OUR INLAND SEA. 145 

del Fuego ! I have looked with a feeling akin to 
contempt upon the Digger Indian, and I believe 
I have shuddered at sight of that rock, in the 
depths of yonder canon, where the Ute had 
bound and tortured his white captive. But, al- 
though the white man has not built a fire upon 
the breast of his foe and let the red coals con- 
sume the flesh to the heart, has he not committed 
deeds as cruel? 

And claw and talon; the envenomed tooth 
and that strength which rent and tore? Such 
was the law. The dragon's scales give place to 
the coat of mail, the armour chased or inlaid 
with gold. And now? Among man, the 
battle-ax, or the blade of tempered steel, or the 
weapon which lies near my hand. Degree more 
than kind. But all the land is but a legend of de- 
parted seas, and all the life that dwelt around or 
in them.* 



♦The old lake La Hontan w^3 named in honor of Baron 
La Hontan, one of the early explorers of the head-waters 
of the Mississippi, and was the compliment of Lake Bonne- 
ville. The former, situated mostly within the area now 
forming the State of Nevada, filled a depression along the 



146 OUR INLAND SEA. 

The Harvests of Time ! The gaudy ephemeral, 
the terrible-prolonged! -SEons after aeons, and 
the work goes on. Yon archaean peak, snow- 
crowned, has roots in nether fire. Over and over, 
sown and gathered, gathered and sown. Behold 
the sedimentary rocks — strata below strata, tier 
above tier, the remains of a thousand fields ! Hor- 
rible crops! Like that which sprang from the 
dragon's teeth, creatures that fought and de- 
stroyed each other. Eocene, Miocene, Pleiocene 
— stored in the solid rock, beneath the sub-soils; 
scattered again in desert sands, the harvests lie. 
Beast and bird and reptile, and still there is no 
end. 

And the mighty birds? The Ichthyorius, and 
the Hesperorius? The reptile-birds and the 

western border of the Great Basin, at the base of the 
Sierra Nevada; the latter embraced almost entirely the 
present State of Utah, occupying a corresponding position 
on the east side of the Great Basin, at the foot of the 
Wasatch Moxintains. Lake Bonneville was 19,750 square 
miles in area and had a maximum depth of about 1,000 
feet. Lake La Hontan covered 8,422 square miles of sur- 
face, and in the deepest part, the present site of Pyramid 
Lake, was 886 feet in depth. 
Russell, in Report of U. S. Geological History, 1885. 



OUR INLAND SEA. 147 

bird-like reptiles? Their rule is past. Ended in 
the west is the dynasty of the toothed-birds. Far 
away, and it seems that the birds and the reptiles 
were one. Across the lands and waters they 
stalked or paddled. And now the Jurassic seas 
are dry. Their creatures are gathered to the har- 
vests of time. Have the gulls come down from 
those? With graceful wing-motion, the white 
gulls beat the air. With piercing cries they wheel 
up to the highest cliff -line and there they hover. 
They drift past the trellis, and among my vines. 
And there came the snake. The reptile with en- 
venomed tooth, the birds with perfected wing. 
And there the result of the parted ways. 

"They were human beings" — that is the point. 
What are my struggles, my trials in redeeming 
the waste, compared to those aboriginal beings? 
My man has a hundred resources not possessed 
by the first inhabitants. When did they discover 
the use of corn? From whence came their wheat? 
The instruments which Caliban wields are as 
much superior, too, as are his resources of mind. 



148 OUR INLAND SEA. 

His mattock, his spade, his pick and his hoe, how 
far removed in effectiveness they are from those 
of palaeolithic art. 

Already moss-grown is the mill-wheel of the 
pioneer. The first grinding-stones for the alien 
miller were quarried from the native hills. And 
so were the grinding-stones that were taken from 
the pre-historic mounds. I have listened to the 
pioneer stories of the white-headed miller, but 
how I should have liked to hear the legend of 
those beings who bent over the primitive mills. 

And the harvests to be? The future stretches 
out into the white mists of the unknown, as the 
past sinks back into the blackness of the long for- 
gotten. 

A sun-stroke — why not? The thunder mut- 
ters; the cumuli appear; the mighty clouds grow 
to a toppling height. Afar in the land may be 
seen the quiver of diffused lightning, or the jag- 
ged bolt strikes to the earth without rain. Dark 
from excess of brightness in the August sky, the 
denuded mountains take on that solemn hue that 



OUR INLAND SEA. 149 

tells of middle summer. Why falls not the 
moisture from yonder heavens? Can one's 
thought on these days be sane? There are mo- 
ments when one feels the motion, the whirling 
of our planet through space; when one grows 
dizzy with it, exhilarated; capable, it seems, of 
swift, immeasurable flight — of instant transfer- 
ence beyond the suns ! 

The Plesiosaurus, the Pterodactyl, the Ich- 
thyosaurus, the mighty Iguanodon? Besides hav- 
ing seen those fossil remains, have I not, also, 
seen the living creatures themselves? Their very 
presence, as it were, in the fever nights of Aug- 
ust? What are fever-dreams but the heat-loos- 
ened images of transmitted memories? Our 
earliest ancestors may have been contemporary 
with the Chinese dragon. How like to those 
stony remains, in its grotesque hideousness, is 
that national emblem. Blaze forth, O sun! 
Scorch with thy beams this shadeless isle ; make 
flash again this shining sea! In millions of 
wombs life quickens ; in countless graves the dead 
decay. "Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty !" 



150 OUR INLAND SEA. 

Shall we so exclaim? Or shall we watch the 
Fates gather in the stars? Blaze forth, O sun! 
In the heart-furnace the fever is high as thine. 



FROM LIFE TO LIFE. 




XIII. 
FROM LIFE TO LIFE. 

IT is since the advent of man, that this moun- 
tain peak became an island. The island be- 
longs, in the words of science, to the Psycho- 
zoic Era. While butte and gully, cliff and plain, 
of the surrounding mainlands, tell of the mam- 
mals of every age, I connect the island only with 
the race of man. 

"In all previous ages," says the common text- 

153 



154 OUR INLAND SEA. 

book, "there rules both brute force and ferocity. 
In this age alone — Psychozoic — Reason appears 
as ruler. The order of nature must be adjusted 
to this keynote. Therefore, the great ruling mam- 
mals of the previous age must become extinct, 
and the mammalian class must become subordin- 
ate; noxious animals and plants must diminish, 
and useful ones be preserved." 

Contemporary with the mammoth and the 
mastodon, and the great cave bear, a triple fight, 
then,had my man of the cairn. He must fight with 
the beasts; he must fight with man, the equal- 
ly savage foe, and he must fight with nature, on 
his upward way. And besides those there was 
that other fight,that fight we have with ourselves. 
That fight is with savage, perhaps, as well as it is 
with civilized man, the strangest fight of all. 

"Man a tool-using animal" — there it lies. Age 
of Bronze, and Age of Stone; the rugged flints 
the first of all. A weapon, not a tool, is the great 
stone battle-ax, but a tool was the rock with 
which it was made ; the rock which the old savage 
once held in his hands. 



OUR INLAND SEA. 155 

Back of the altars in the Kivas, or ceremonial 
chambers of the cHff-dwellers, we see deep pits. 
There is the symbol. There is the thought of the 
Indians. We are children of earth ; creatures who 
have struggled — to the music of the gods, strug- 
gled — from out the darkness of the underworld. 
Science, then, and the theology of primitive man, 
are in accord. 

"The Garden of Eden, the Sun standing still in 
Gideon ! Who cares what the fact may be," cries 
Emerson, "when we have made a constellation of 
it to hang in heaven an immortal sign?" But let 
us dream with Truth. In the history of the earth 
prior to the advent of man, I do take concern. I 
am as Milton makes the gardener Adam — one 
who desires to know. But I love the dreamer just 
the same. 

This unearthed crudity tells what, in time, all 
crudities must be. But in the Indian legend is 
there not a truth? We would climb to the light. 
I see the once-time reptiles, that spread their 
snowy wings. But it is to the infinite that man 
would climb. 



156 OUR INLAND SEA. 

Its black limestone strata tilted at a sharp an- 
gle, the white tufa twisted into its lower crevices ; 
with its great round boulders, its cliff, its oolitic 
sands, my island is pictorially fine. But what does 
it tell? Now the island is more than a piece of 
scenery. It has become a mystery, it is identified 
with the past, with the development of human 
life. This ground was prepared to receive the 
vines, and as I take concern in the island before 
that time, I take concern in the world before the 
advent of the race. 

A mighty drama — the Nature show ! Wonder- 
ful the scenery, ever shifting, and wonderful the 
actors, ever shifting, too. Mountains and forests, 
seas and deserts, all different from ours. Imag- 
ination brings up the scenes. The surrounding 
landscape as it exists today is but the wreck and 
ruin of those that have gone before. 

Bring man upon the scene and the sound of 
strife is increased. The warfare is changed. Still 
there is blood, but for background there is the 
light of flames. No need to imagine, either, pre- 
historic or later Europe. No need to see, after 



OUR INLAND SEA. 157 

the primeval man and his lineage, the Saracen 
and the Turk, following the Mede and the Per- 
sian ; or to see the countless battle-fields from the 
plains of Lybia to those hyperborean snows that 
over-top the world. There has been warfare here. 
The cattle browse over the fields of strife; the 
plow turns up the ancient arms. And here on the 
island is that which has lain beneath my feet. 

A somber picture, if we see but the darker side. 
No vision of a Golden Age, but the forces of na- 
ture at work, the bestial fury, and the struggles 
of man. One terrible race succeeds another. The 
strong overcome the weak, or changed conditions, 
makes the latest evolvement the fittest to live. 

But the human species is single. Yet, like a^ 
house divided, the race has warred. As for the- 
dead fighter, his seed is destroyed. It is as thought 
his tribe had never been. Instead of the New 
America, it may be the Old. Unlike the invader of 
olden Europe, the Homesteader destroys not one 
civilization to make room for another, but sup- 
plants the beast and the barbarian. He brings 
civilization where it was not before. 



158 OUR INLAND SEA. 

But Old or New; from Eden or no, the fight 
goes on. Though the cliff-dweller and all who 
dwelt up and down this land were of another race 
one touch of nature makes the world akin. How 
differ the living on this island, from that dead 
man of the cairn? Advanced in knowledge, of 
course, but that flash of the knife is still in my 
mind. 

Just as we found them, lie the bones in the 
cairn. Perhaps I will again seal the tomb. Why 

not close down the lid and replace the soil? Why 
not, as of yore, let its occupant sleep on? 

Yet if there be death, also there is life ; if there 
be crime on the earth, above there is the glorious 
sky. Over that grave hang the fresh, green 
leaves ; down by the shore, the blue waters spar- 
kle. As I look around my island, I might imagine 
at this hour, that death and crime had never been. 

Shall I stand appalled at the endless tragedy? 
Shall I listen, a universal mourner, to the eternal 
dirge? The Seer has forward-gazing as well as 
introspective eyes. 



OUR INLAND SEA. 159 

The condition of primitive man, so science de- 
clares, was simply the condition of the lower ani- 
mals. Yet relieved, it goes on to tell, by a germ 
instinct or capacity of progress which has carried 
the development of the human race from a low to 
successively higher stages, from a rude and bar- 
baric phase to a more refined civilization. And 
therefore — 

For an hour I lay on the cliff-top. "Let the 
dead bury the dead." Have I seized the thought? 
There can be no rest. How deep strike the roots 
of my vines? I have strange misgivings that they 
may be fed at an undesirable source. O, this flesh, 
this earth, this clay ! O, the flowers, the fruit, the 
withered grass and tree ! Legends of the growth 
of Eden, the golden apples of Hesperides — what 
do they mean? In that therefore there opens an 
endless vista. With the germ of immortality, 
man is everything, without it, nothing. 

Never will nature repeat her work. Never 
again on this planet, will she evolve those forms 
of the past. Is it not clear to sight and under- 
standing, that nature moves constantly onward 



160 OUR INLAND SEA. 

to higher ideals? The face of the land is changed? 
the life of the past is gone. Far, indeed, those 
days when those human remains that lie in the 
cairn stood up and walked. And longer, too, the 
time one need look backward to reach that other, 
that period, I mean, when life was in those bones; 
when roamed those monsters, whose stony joints 
now sprawl amid the rocks. All things are dif- 
ferent now from that which once they were, and 
yet — 

It is possible now for one's self to be. 

I have uprooted the thorn and destroyed the 
cactus. I have seen those things which made of 
this place a morgue. I have seen this island, 
which I homesteaded for life, homesteaded, as it 
were, for death. But, lo! why should I faint? 
The sun that bleaches the bones of mountain or 
man, reddens the blood in the homesteader's 
veins. And I come to this untouched soil, de- 
stroy this coarse herbage of the desert for what? 

To make way for that companion of civiliza- 
tion — the vine. 



THE PAGEANTS OF HISTORY. 




•••«< 



XIV. 
THE PAGEANTS OF HISTORY. 

FOR the study of History, I like those mod- 
ern charts, in which the course of the na- 
tions is represented as parallel but ever- 
changing streams. Better than books are these 
to teach the correlations. With a chart before 
us — actual or mental — we feel history as a whole. 
Then the words London, Peking, St. Petersburg, 
Ispahan, are more than names. We realize upon 

163 



164 OUR INLAND SEA. 

humanity the effects of the Caucasus, the Sahara, 
or the Kirghiz Steppes. We understand Hanni- 
bal upon the Alps ; how man makes now the First 
or the Eleventh Crusade, and the varying for- 
tunes of India, from the invasion of he of Mace- 
don, to the time of the English Conquest. 

And how those streams of the nations change ! 
Like a Nile or a Ganges we see them come down 
from their source. Now they swell into mighty 
rivers ; the augmentive power is shown of a Ram- 
eses II, or the Hun, Attila, As nature, man has 
his periods of slow activity, now his bursts of sud- 
den passion. We see the triumphant nations pur- 
sue their lengthened course, or fail; dwindle or 
be lost like the Rhine in the sands of Holland, or 
be merged like the Amazon, in the greater sea. 

As banners to an army, so are portraits to his- 
tory. There is history on the canvasses of the 
great masters, as on the pages of Tacitus or Juve- 
nal. But history must be re-written. With a 
wider view, we must grasp the deeper law. Am I 
a Homesteader on a desert island, and not know 
that? The present is but an adjustment between 



OUR INLAND SEA. 165 

the stories of the old world and the hope of the 
new. 

The Northern Cliff, what happened that time 
its tiers were laid? In the history of the human 
family — nothing. Long ere man, the architect, 
nature, was busy with this rugged work. Ages 
before the pyramids of Cheops, the Tower of 
Babel, this work went forward. Here nature 
quarried, split and carved. Before the race this 
cliff was built. That natural column, supporting 
the living rock, stood thus ere was conceived the 
Doric. This island was fashioned, ere were be- 
gun the rock temples of Elephanta, or at Aboo 
Simbel, and the mighty monolith on its top lay 
there, ere was carved the twin colossi — the vocal 
Memnon and his silent companion, that have 
watched, now, for a million times, the sunrise on 
the marshy plain of Thebes. 

A different source I would need to learn the na- 
ture-epic of this, my home. 

That archaeological activity of these our days; 
that restlessness of spirit which makes men exca- 



166 OUR INLAND SEA. 

vate through the layers of earth gathered above 
the remains of deserted cities of Europe and 
Asia ; scoop away the sands of Africa from about 
the statue's feet, or fell the trees that shroud the 
ruined buildings in the woods of Yucatan, what 
is it? Is it other than the natural accompani- 
ment of the modern scientific thought and the de- 
sire to look forward into the far unknown? The 
lonely watch-towers that stand on the rocks to 
the south of this land, do they not tell that war- 
fare has been carried on between the race who 
peopled them and those who dwelt in the cliffs? 
Pageants there have been around them, but not 
those of history. 

Give up your secrets, O island walls of stone ! 

Ere the cairn was built, may have fallen yon 
rock. It may have gathered lichens ere primal 
man walked naked the earth. As now it lies, it 
has lain through the ages ere the leaf or the skin 
of beast was used as a covering of shame. While 
the race has learned to serve its pride with other 



OUR INLAND SEA. 167 

than that which we found in the cairn ; while the 
bead of flint, and the face ornaments of stone 
gave place to the polished gems and while that 
shaggy covering from creatures as fierce as 
themselves, gave place to the richest product of 
loom and mine. Of this island what could the 
old block tell? 

Perhaps in our work we destroyed good evi- 
dence. The sifters and I have been to blame. 
The surveyors, too, have done as much. In the 
clearing of ground, in the building of walls, and 
in the piling up of stones to serve as boundary 
lines, we have obliterated history. What a fast- 
ness is the Northern Cliff! Scale its front who 
could? It is inaccessible, save from one point, 
and that is up the narrow depression where the 
skull was found. There grew my vines and from 
there I have removed the stones. 

How stupid I have been ! With my new light, 
how easily it is for me to see. Those stones were 
placed with instinctive cunning. Certain of the 
arts are primeval. I doubt if a modem engineer 



168 OUR INLAND SEA. 

could have placed those simple means of defense 
to a better advantage. Where they had lain so 
long, I replace, mentally, the stones. Thereby I 
learn the skill of the ancient man. 

From the cliff-top, how well one might hurl 
rocks upon a foe beneath ! These round boulders 
and stones, what missiles they are. How they 
would leap and bound, and destroy all life in their 
path. I know, now, the reason of those globes on 
the island crest, and why they were carried there 
from the Southwest Bay, and also why so many 
lay scattered at the foot of the cliff. So they 
have, or had lain, for what ages, since the end of 
a battle? 

I close my eyes and see all the sickening de- 
tails of an old time slaughter. Women and chil- 
dren have been thrown from this height. The 
island has resounded with the shriek of despair. 
I hear yells of triumph and see the arrows fly. 
The owner of the skull may have fallen in single 
combat, or during some general melee. Perhaps 
he defended, in some hand to hand struggle, each 
foot of the slope. He may have died covered 



OUR INLAND SEA. 169 

with wounds, a primitive and unchronicled hero. 

Why not a savage Hector or Achilles here? 
An Ajax? The tribe may have known its Cas- 
sandra, too. But on this island might have been 
reversed the siege of Troy. The cairn might be 
that of some victorious Priam. Perhaps long 
before the Trojan days, those who sought refuge 
here drove back their savage foes. The be- 
sieged on this pile of rock, had they supply of 
food and water, might have laughed at a besieg- 
ing force. 

But this slab, on which I have sat to read — 
might it not have slipped from its place, that time 
the printing-press was being invented. Here is 
one whose fall might correspond in date to that 
auspicious Friday on which Columbus discov- 
ered a new world; perhaps the landing of the 
Pilgrim Fathers : and this other, whose fractured 
edges are still so bright, the entry of the Pio- 
neers into this western valley. 

Very different is the study of history from the 
making of history. To contemplate the events of 



170 OUR INLAND SEA. 

the past, and to be one in the shaping of those 
of the present bring about every opposite con- 
ditions of mind. To be spectator merely instead 
of actor, even in the present, is to view history 
from very different standpoints. And to contem- 
plate the certainty of past time and to imagine 
the possibilities of the future is to know the very 
poles of thought. 

Will either of these mountain passes be a sec- 
ond Thermopylae? Will either of these canons 
be a Pass of Glencoe? The spectacles of war 
have had their day, and what need of another 
St. Gothard, a Schipka, or western Gettysburg? 
As one mountain peak may centralize quite an- 
other set of landscapes than does another so in 
the ages, with history, some peak-like man. But 
with the warrior? O pass away such scenes of 
the modem world. Such scenes as those to which 
the island massacre was but a prelude ! 

What will be the names of the yet unfounded 
cities? Or those that stand, through what course 
will they run? What far-off moralist shall look 
on their decay? They will have their Marius 



OUR INLAND SEA. 171 

and Petrarch as did Carthage and the City of the 
Seven Hills. Some one will fill a part to them, 
such as imagination conjured up in the New 
Zealander seated upon the broken stones of Lon- 
don Bridge. 

These mountains look down and wait. 

The croak of the raven I shall hear no more. 
For all his tricks Devil has paid the debt. An: 
extra amount of spite and sullenness foretold the 
end. Perhaps the unfortunate bird carried with- 
in his body, an unextracted shot, and, old as he: 
was, this may have fretted his life away. Devil's, 
or Raven's Mound will be a new island landmark^ 



AND LO! THE PLAGUES. 




i^'.\ 



"L 



XV. 
AND LO ! THE PLAGUES. 

ATAT anguis in herba." Yes, that is 
true. But here my foes come out of the 
dust. Air and water, too, are filled 
with the ministers of pain. 

It is remarkable, the number of lizards that 
have so quickly appeared. Among volcanic or 
tufa rocks, so hot these days that they almost 
blister the hand if touched, they absorb com- 
fort and happiness and everywhere the erratic 

175 



176 OUR INLAND SEA. 

tracks of the numerous reptiles make strange 
hieroglyphics upon the burning sands. Twice 
within the week, I have met that terrible Arach- 
nid, the black tarantula. He lives in the crevices 
of these rocks. Nor is this all. An incredible 
number of gnats infest the shore, and where a 
few stunted bushes stand near the water's edge, 
they are covered thick with a veil of cobwebs; 
the big, fat spiders making the beach there a 
place to avoid. 

I have decided on a scorpion hunt. The first 
thing which I saw on awakening in my hammock 
this morning, was one of the half-grown crea- 
tures. As the villainous intruder passed across a 
corner of my bamboo pillow, and but a few 
inches from my face, it was a startling sight. Yes- 
terday one of the same objectionable neighbors 
climbed to a place at the board. A wicked ap- 
pearing scamp he was, as he afterward lay, a pris- 
oner and with sting erected, at the bottom of a 
china bowl. The guano-sifters will join in the 
sport. They, too, have received similar and re- 
peated visits. Our brotherhood sympathies with 



OUR INLAND SEA. 177 

the natural owners of this island do not lead us 
so far as to make us willing to risk a poisonous 
stab in the dark. 

Hard is the Homesteader's lot these meridian 
days. 

And thirst? This sea of brine would let one 
die of thirst. "Ropy," is the description that my 
companions give of the water in their covered 
barrels, and but little succor would there be, if my 
supply of fresh water failed, in the small con- 
densing apparatus that foresight made me bring. 
The large percentage of salt in this surrounding 
sea, would make of condensation a difficult mat- 
ter. Within the circle of horizon visible from 
my door-step, there have been happenings. O, 
those poor sheep that perished on Fremont Isl- 
and ; that castaway on Church ! More bitter, in- 
deed, this sea, than the Wells of Marah. 

Years ago, but the bones are there. The silt 
and tifa half cover them and, in time, they may 
become fossils too. There is a spring on Fre- 
mont Island, or at times there is. It flows forth 



178 OUR INLAND SEA. 

amid rock beneath a steep bank on the northern 
shore, and, as at certain seasons the island also 
bears an abundance of fine, sweet bunch-grass, 
the sheep had been left there for winter pastur- 
age. The change in the sea's surface varies at 
times, and the spring is often buried beneath the 
waves. The poor sheep, victims of a short-sight- 
ed shepherd, thus died a death of torture. The 
"rise" had mingled the fresh water of the spring 
with that of the brine. 

Had it not been for the depredations of a wild 
beast, the castaway, on Church Island, would 
have perished as did the sheep. Thrown on the 
western shore, his boat driven upon the rocks 
and torn apart, this solitary voyager, not know- 
ing the island to be inhabited — on its eastern side 
— was in a sorry plight. He passed the day, fol- 
lowing the wreck, in searching for water along 
the western shore; a shore where not a drop of 
fresh water is to be found. By the merest chance 
he was rescued from a painful death, not on the 
first day, however, but on the second, when he 
was in an exhausted and delirious condition. A 



OUR INLAND SEA. 179 

wild-cat had committed repeated trespass upon 
the poultry of the Island Farm, and a couple of 
young men were in quest of the thief. Their as- 
tonishment at finding an unknown man — a cast- 
away — lying alone on the hills, apparently in a 
dying condition, was as great as their appearance 
upon the scene was fortunate. 

As for the sifters, they have made some char- 
coal. A stranded cedar and some Gunnison clay 
were the means. Prevention is better than cure, 
and it is better late than never. 

Generous boon ! My place of refuge is in "The 
Tub." I enjoy to the full the delights of the 
bath. When on land it seems that one must suf- 
focate, that in the intolerable noon-day the rocks 
must melt, there is comfort in the cooling waves. 
Even the strength of the brawny sifter succumbs 
to this. Like myself he lives as much in the wa- 
ter as he does on the land. What a great sani- 
tarium this sea must become ! Let the sun scorch 
never so, let the acrid waters shrink up the grass 



180 OUR INLAND SEA. 

and herbage ; let it breed the gnat, or strew the 
beach with offensive larvae, yet in its embrace 
there is renewed strength, a tonic for mind and 
body. To the tired limbs it brings a rest, and to 
the weary brain repose. 

And here is "The Tub:" distant from the hut, 
some five hundred yards or so, at the base o£ a 
square piece of masonry, an abutment of the 
Northern Cliff, where, when the sea is rough, and 
the wind from the north, the eddies swirl, there is 
worn in the rock a smooth, round basin. Other 
basins of a similar kind are to be found along 
the shore, but this one remains my favorite. It 
is some twenty-five feet across, and about five 
feet deep, and the bottom is covered with a layer 
of white and shining sand. 

A delicious place ; one that annuls the physical 
sufferings of these trying days. There I go, and 
there I sport at my ease. The strong brine of the 
sea has a tendency to float one's limbs to the sur- 
face, so that the sensation produced when one is 
in the water is always as novel as pleasant. When 
the sea is in any wise calm, it is an easy matter to 



OUR INLAND SEA. 181 

recline thus for an indefinite length of time ; but 
when the sea is rough, it is very difficult to make 
headway in swimming against even the smallest 
of waves. 

I enjoy the bath. Somnolence broods over land 
and sea. The hot air swoons ; the motionless water 
lies pale and unsullied ; not a troublesome gnat is 
abroad from the shore. The gulls, whom I dis- 
turbed as I walked through their colony, have 
sunk back to their nests; some ten score or more 
of the startled birds who took flight to the bay, 
now float with heads below wings. A couple of 
lizards come out from under a stone, and, sleep- 
ing, bask on the sands. 

What is this? Across the distance there comes 
a change. The horizon is melted away; the 
mountains are blurred; the hills and promon- 
tories swim in air. The farthest chains of moun- 
tains appear to part, to become peaked islcinds. 
The sky seems water, the water sky. Substance 
and shadow are indistinguishable. Do I wake or 
dream? 

It is the beginning of a noon-day mirage. 



THE AUTUMNAL EQUINOX. 




XVI 
THE AUTUMNAL EQUINOX. 

RAIN, rain ! Once more a troglodyte. In- 
cessantly the water runs off the roof. Now 
one can know the gloom of mind in which 
the cave-dweller passed the long winter months, 
and with what reluctance he relinquished the 
companionship and wild sports of his fellows, and 
retreated, like the lower animals, to his rocky 
den. Like a wetted pebble is the rain-drenched 

185 



186 OUR INLAND SEA. 

island. The bushes drip, the porous ground is 
dark and softened, the sands of the beach are 
white and shining. Rain, rain ! Ever the rush of 
the lateral rain. 

What a deluge is this ! A grand phenomenon 
— the coming of the clouds, the exalted parts of 
the earth levelled, torn down by the omnipotent 
sea, and carried to rest for aeons, ere by earth- 
quake shock, or the slow upheaval — the balanc- 
ing of things — it may be again thrown up, new 
ranges of Sierra Nevada or Wasatch Mountains, 
to be again denuded, worn down into decrepti- 
tude, like the old, old hills, that lie between the 
Canadas, and the Northeastern states. Did such 
rainfalls precede the sinking of lost Atlantis? 
These down-pours of water are often accompan- 
ied along the coast by earthquake shocks which 
cause a trembling of the earth for thousands of 
miles. 

Despite my crotchets, and they are not a few, 
I am much indebted to my friends, the sifters. To 
enliven the tedium of these days is a task not 



OUR INLAND SEA. 187 

easy. Not without weariness are clouds, how- 
ever grand, to be watched forever. Man is natur- 
ally a gregarious animal, and such weather as 
this, if nothing else, would drive him to social 
intercourse. The sifters, wise men, pass a merry 
time. The day of their departure is close at hand. 
Their work for the season is ended, and at any 
moment the schooner may appear, and then an 
end to all diversion. In the meantime, their up- 
roarious mirth makes the rafters ring. 

Some new Ostade (the elder), might find sub- 
jects for his pencil in the sifters' cabin. A fol- 
lower of the pupil of Hals, or Van Schendel 
would paint well those scenes. A most pictur- 
esque phase of labor I have seen here daily, and 
no less interesting are the men in idleness. The: 
out door labor removed the men from vulgar 
commonplace, and now the night scenes of pas- 
time are quite as good. Nature composes in the 
sifters' cabin, a hundred pieces, each one better 
than those of the Little Masters. The sturdy or 
lank forms of the men; their eager faces, those 
who play the game, the onlookers, the drowsers, 



188 OUR INLAND SEA. 

the candle flame — of such are the pictures made. 
And in the background, the ruddy reflections on 
the smooth rim or bottom of pan or kettle, the 
shining of tin or copper against the brown black- 
ness of bituminous shadow. 

Grand are the statements of science. Take, 
for instance, the weather forecast. This is a 
phase over the Inland Sea of "a storm that is to 
shake the western mountains and strew the At- 
lantic coast with wreck." 

The Wasatch, loftiest of all these surrounding 
mountains — 

Place where the adverse winds meet and where 

lie 
In wait the thunder-clouds — 

have bred upon their summits, or attracted toward 
them, the greatest number of local or wandering 
storms. A station of vantage this! The Alpha 
and Omega of many a storm I see, and how the 
mountains turn pale or dark by turns, as the sun 



OUR INLAND SEA. 189 

and storm alternate across the expectant land. 
It is a commonplace, a simile worn out, to 
compare a sky-storm to a human battle. Who, 
indeed, on seeing the strife, can escape the 
thought. There is a passion in the clouds them- 
selves. 

In the Hidden Valley, when the sky above was 
clear, I knew of approaching storms by infallible 
signs. There was the soft clashing of those green 
and silver shields, the leaves of the aspens; or 
there were the dog-fish congregated in groups 
along the lake shores, their black, ugly muzzles 
resting upon some half-sunken log, or bit of 
shale, as with their stupid eyes they stared up at 
the blue. Then rose the clouds. The cumuli, 
those giants of the summer sky, looked over the 
mountain walls. With their mighty shadows, 
they threw deep gloom over pine forest and lake, 
they darkened the birth-place of a hundred 
streams. Then the thunder crashed, the light- 
ning bridged the high valley from side to side, 
and, anon, came the rush of the wind and rain. 

Here I mark the coming of the storms; the 



190 OUR INLAND SEA. 

progress of the clouds along the parallel or fore- 
shortened ranges. I mark the grand charges, the 
objective points. Across the valleys sweep armies 
of cloud, they rush along the crests and through 
the canons, or whole battalions sink into cross ra- 
vines. The hosts of cloud assault the mountain 
bulwarks, as the hosts of men attack some huge 
redoubt. I see some height taken, lost, retaken, 
and lost again — the contention around the cores, 
the central clusters of highest peaks. Separate 
storms pass not, but live and die on the place of 
their birth. Now the Wasatch and the Onaqui, 
stand white. Here and there, also, some ambi- 
tious peak of the Raft River and lower ranges 
has caught the snow. The great branches of the 
Rockies have first gathered the autumn clouds on 
their crest, and then passed them eastward to 
drench with their storms the far-gradients and 
plains. 

Dramatic those clouds and spectacular, too. 
After passing from the Pacific waves, over the 
sands of Arizona, and the mountains of the coast, 
the storms of the equinox, arrive here with a dif- 



OUR INLAND SEA. 191 

ference. These rains, warm at the Gulf, or out on 
the western main, are cold and sleety here 
through contact with the Sierra peaks. Like a 
mighty wall, as if one of these mountain ranges 
should suddenly come forward, they come — the 
clouds — hurried by the west winds from the sea. 
Only the cloud-wall is higher, steeper, even, than 
these mountains of stone. One looks upward, on 
their near approach, at an angle of sharp per- 
spective along their awful front — how grandly 
carved — to the vast facade. Sometimes the move- 
ment is made en masse. The sky is left clear be- 
hind the storms without leaving such clouds as 
now I see, exhausted, dead in the hollow twi- 
light, along each mountain range. 

These reactionary storms, where have they 
been? From the west to the east, from the east 
to the west ! From the plains they return to the 
heights. There is grandeur in recurrence; 
grandeur in the swing of the pendulum. Back 
from the Rockies, they come. Back from the 
Great Divide. Back from the Wind River peaks ; 



192 OUR INLAND SEA. 

from the Sangre de Christo, the Medicine Bow^ 
the Uinta Range. Back again from the Was- 
atch to the neighboring Oquirrhs; back to the 
Onaqui, to the Tintic ; across the Raft-River, the 
Humboldt, the Sierra Nevada, and so once more 
to the western main. Wasting their strength 
from day to day, here a little, there a little, but 
keeping ever onward; along the course of the 
Platte, over the Black Hills, the high plateaus 
and the sky-hung valleys. A retreat grand as 
that of the ten thousand Greeks. A storm ad- 
vance that covered a continent; a retreat from 
the Atlantic to the Pacific coast. 

A certain average, I have forgotten what, in a 
hundred years, the geologists say, the Wasatch 
are lifted up. So much again the denuding agen- 
cies waste them down. Two months only — ^July 
and August — that snow has not flown on the 
range. This snow of the later equinox, will be al- 
most as transient, no doubt, as was that of June. 
That new covering of white will have disap- 
peared ere the snow that is to remain will fall. 
Never, I believe, are the ravines in the upper 



OUR INLAND SEA. 193 

Wasatch free from snow; the waters follow the 
tracks of the ancient glaciers. 

There rush the waters still. Under the clouds 
and unceasing rain, every ravine has its roaring 
stream. Across the canon roads is piled the loos- 
ened rock. Though the clouds may open now 
and again, they close once more. Motionless is 
the water of the sea, seen across the wet rock 
tops and the puddled sands. Nor is there hope 
yet for a change to fair skies. 

Under the ridges of iron-gray stone ; by banks 
and slopes of crumbling shale; through narrow 
gates, giving scarce room for the augmented 
streams and the mountain trail; by isolated 
peaks, girt with rocky belts, or misty with groves 
of pine; beneath strangely twisted mountains, 
broken by craggy glens, and by stooping cliffs, I 
picture the waters come. I see them sleep in the 
lakes and plunge down the mighty slopes ; 

Where the bald-eagle, dweller mid the scene, 
With ruffled breast and wings aslant, serene 
Rises to meet the storm ; 



194 OUR INLAND SEA. 

and where in dizzy swiftness, too, they tear 
across smooth slabs of granite, or are themselves 
overhung by valley trees, or time-worn boulders 
of colossal size — the Weber, the Cottonwoods, 
the Bear, the Provo (Timpanogas), and all the 
rest of them. 



MY HOMESTEAD HORIZONS. 




XVII. 
MY HOMESTEAD HORIZONS. 

A MIGHTY drowsiness is on the land. The 
Harvest-Moon — the Indian's Moon of 
Falling Leaves — has supplanted the 
Moons of Fire. Dream-like has become my island. 
Ruddy, like a weary and belated sun, comes up 
the Autumn moon, and like a vast Koh-i-noor, the 
sun itself is blurred and yellow. Haze-enwrapped 
are the distant Wasatch; through deepening 

197 



198 OUR INLAND SEA. 

shades of saddened violet, the Onaqui lapse into 
melancholia. The western headlands, the jutting 
promontories, appear as if cut from dim, orange 
crape, or maroon-colored velvet. Wistful and 
vague stand the peaked islands, and shell-like is 
the gleam of the far-stretched brine. 

One more turn, and the present richness of the 
time will be gone. This heavy lassitude, this vol- 
uptuous sadness, this wondrous effect of sensuous 
color, comes not entirely from a local cause, but 
comes as much from the low, autumnal sun. In 
the heavens there is a transfiguration, and the 
transfiguration extends to earth. Always there 
are the same great stretches of water around, al- 
ways the same dreary and monotonous hills ; ever 
the same strange walls of rock, and ever the same 
wild peaks in clustered multitudes. But how the 
seasons and the great sun play with them ! They 
are ever the same, yet never the same ; eternal yet 
evanescent, playthings with time and the ele- 
ments. 

How the whole scene glows! Through my 
glass, I bring near such especial spots of bright- 



OUR INLAND SEA. 199 

ness, as attract the eye, and find them to be lone- 
ly aspens or spring-fed maples. From this spot I 
watched the spring climb up the heights, and 
now I have seen the autumn come, as it were, 
from the sky. 

One peculiarity of my position here, is to find 
myself within a circle of changing colors, and to 
see the distant landscape smolder with ruddy 
tones, and then, so it seemed, the flames burst 
forth. The high foliage changed its hues in an 
hour, the circle of frost-made colors, ever ex- 
panded downward and around. Now it kindled 
the chaparral on some mountain side or a highest 
hill-top. It crowded down through the canons, 
those ways of the hills, and paused only when it 
had invaded the lower valleys and reached the 
water's edge. 

Nowhere in Europe can one see among the 
trees that abandon to glory, that ostentation, that 
carnival, that very Saturnalia of color, which may 
be seen in autumn among the American woods. 

Autumn is to the seasons, as twilight to the 



200 OUR INLAND SEA. 

day. Both work a similar effect on the mind. 
Objectively the artist sees nature; subjectively 
the poet sees it; and the philosopher, perhaps, 
sees it both ways. Rather "1' Allegro," than "II 
Penseroso," of landscape should be seen by the 
pioneer. The morning phase of intellect, rather 
than that of evening, should be possessed by him 
who would begin "The Course of Empire." But, 
at times, the splendor of the American woods, is 
a sort of paean, a glorification — an apotheosis of 
the year, that leaves no place for sadness. 

I recall a wood : Primeval trees were there ; 
oaks so vast that each one seemed a grove. And 
stubborn hickories, too, the noble walnut, and the 
high-reaching pecan. Mighty grape-vines made 
their fantastic coils amid the tree trunks, shot 
straight into the dense, drooping masses of foli- 
age, or hung in swing-like loops. There at noon- 
day, one heard the sleep-inducing snore of the 
tree-toad ; beheld at sundown the myriad, drifting 
fire-flies, or heard, amid the dusky shadows, the 
Whip-poor- Will, or that wild, shrill music, the 
twilight clamor of the Katy-dids. 



OUR INLAND SEA. 201 

One felt in that wood the gloom, as well as the 
glory, of the autumn time. How chilly the sap 
that flowed downward again through the rugged 
trunks and limbs; returning with the loosened 
leaves whence it had been drawn — where the 
progenitors of the aged trees mouldered to 
touch-wood in the virgin soil, or decayed in gath- 
ered slime, beneath the surface of the pools. 

Contrasted with that lowland growth, how 
meagre this mountain foliage. I miss, too, the 
Alleghanies, the huge, old beech trees, the hem- 
locks and tamaracks of the eastern hills, or, in the 
absence of these, the live oaks and madrones that 
fret with their roundness the Sierra slopes. In 
autumn all the resplendence of the sunset skies 
lie on the woods. But, ah ! it must be confessed, 
it wants in spirituality. It no longer makes us 
think of the Cherubim, the wings of archangels, 
but rather of the earthly garments of prelates and 
kings. 

Up in the mountain hollows, there is now a 
wonderful sight. It is the frost-stricken leaves of 



202 OUR INLAND SEA. 

the aspens. Backed by dark spruce, or sub-alpine 
fir, nothing can be more lovely. Seen in the 
groves, each tree is a perfect thing, a picture in 
itself. The eye takes cognizance of each silver- 
white shaft, each erratic branch, the mottlings of 
rent and lichen, and each separate gold leaf, as it 
quivers against the firs. But now I see from the 
synthetic standpoint. Soon all that brilliance will 
be stripped from the trees and made sodden upon 
the ground. The rocks at the entrance to the ra- 
vines and glens, and at the canon mouths, will be 
covered a foot thick with the drifted leaves. 

It was through its pictures of autumn that 
American art was first noticed abroad. I love the 
pomp and splendor of the Eastern woods, but 
quite as well I love this Western sight. I love to 
see the autumnal sun send its rays parallel down 
some tree-crowded glen, and fill the hosts of 
leaves with resplendent light. Then they seem 
akin to the radiant clouds. 

The great woods are doomed. Famed Sher- 
wood, the haunt of Robin Hood, is no more leg- 



OUR INLAND SEA. 203 

endary than are most of the great woods of the 
Eastern and Middle States, that were the haunt 
of the Huron and the Iroquois. They exist only, 
as their inhabitants, on the pages of the early his- 
torian and the novelist. 

And the woods on the heights? Much longer, 
I suspect, before the mountains are robbed of 
their woody splendor. Indeed, in the nature of 
things, that time may never come. A thousand 
years from now, and on the mountains the au- 
tumn colors may be the same. The foliage may 
be taking on the selfsame kind of glory that it. 
wears this day. And then not a tree of all the 
Eastern forests is likely to stand. 

Take from America's most noted poets those 
passages referring to autumn, and what a loss 
were there! Gone would be the more original 
matter in the National literature. 

"That time of year thou mayest in me behold 
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang 
Upon these boughs which shake against the 
cold." 



204 OUR INLAND SEA. 

Always there is with the poets of Europe, in their 
descriptions of autumn, a tone of lament, a tone 
of sorrow. Sorrow, I mean, without a corre- 
sponding pride in the beauty of the thing de- 
scribed. Keats, with his leaf; Hood, with his 
gathered gold; Scott, with his "shroud of rus- 
sett," are as plaintive as Shelley. Only Words- 
worth, with his mountain ash, and Tennyson, 
with his "hills and scarlet-mingled woods;" ap- 
proach in the least, the American feeling. 

Emerson, Longfellow, Bryant and Holland: 
America's poets do not see autumn as those of 
the British Isles. Less and less, as we leave the 
modern verse and go back into the past, do the 
poets exult in the Month of Color. So in the 
Greek and Roman, the Hebrew, and in Shake- 
speare; and for scriptural thought, we have the 
lament of Solomon. We find the moralizing, but 
not the note of triumph. There is not the boast, 
as it were, over the magnificence of the autumn 
color — 

"The autumn blaze of boundless woods" — 

that we find in Bryant's sonnet. 



OUR INLAND SEA. 205 

The winning of bread; that was the original 
text. Let the warrior or poet do as he may, the 
basis of civilization, is he who tills the soil. "The 
Romans at heart were farmers." From the lands 
of unchanging customs, civilization moves on- 
ward to the lusty west. Behold the new grain 
lands of the world — Iowa, Kansas, Illinois, Da- 
kota, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Nebraska! 

Four thousand, five hundred feet above ocean 
level — the valleys of Utah are overly high for 
grain. Yet the squares of light or dark — golden 
or russet with stubble — tell where the husband- 
man is redeeming the waste. I can see peaks that 
stand to the east of Cache Valley, and others at 
whose feet are the fields of San Pete. There, I 
know, are alpine fields that are sown and reaped, 
and gleaned as carefully as any of Tyrol, or that 
one of Palestine where Boaz met Ruth ! 

Another day's harvesting done, and another 
day gathered to the harvest of Time ! 



ON SLOPE AND ON SHORE. 




XVIII 
ON SLOPE AND ON SHORE. 

THE Month of Vintage, the Month of Wine ! 
Now flows the juice of the grape, now is 
gathered the fruit of the vine. After the 
plow and the sickle, come the sheaves of wheat 
and the Harvest Home ; after toil in the vineyard, 
come the purple clusters and the Vintage Song. 
Could Pyne, that old classic thinker, be here 
with me now, he might see around him, on gigan- 
tic scale, his chromatic star. Here are his grouped 

209 



210 OUR INLAND SEA. 

triads; here are the primaries, the secondaries, 
the tertiaries and the quadrates. In nature's 
warp, the reds, the yellows, the green, the orange 
and the purples, are shot through with the cit- 
rines, the russets and olives. All the hues are 
here except the blue, and that is supplied by the 
deeps of the sky. Even on this lonely spot the 
frost found some leaves to change, and made rich 
hues upon the vineyard slopes. 

Shall my island know a Poem of the Vine? 
The Dryads, the Oreads, the Hamadryads — shall 
I hear them dance in mad joy, reckless with the 
juice of the grape, will the nymphs and fauns, 
wanton here to the notes of seven-reeded Syrinx, 
frenzied by the earth-power in the music of Pan? 

"Lured by his notes, the nymphs their bowers 
forsake ; 
From every fountain, running stream and lake ; 
From every hill and ancient grove around. 
And to symphonious measures strike the 
ground." 



OUR INLAND SEA. 2 1 1 

Ah, no! Not here Silenus nor Bacchus. Dead 
are the vine-crowned gods, and in life they came 
not so far. 

Whence came the vine? Vague is its genesis; 
lost, we are told, in the darks of antiquity. The 
far East, of course, was — in cultivation — its orig- 
inal home. If we are to judge by the standards of 
today, the finest wines of the ancients came, I 
read, from the islands of the ^gean and Ionian 
Seas. That is Chios, Lesbos, Thasos and Crete. 
But neither of these nor Rhodes, nor Cyprus, 
nor any famed spot of the Mediterranean, any 
more than this poor island of mine, was the orig- 
inal home of the fruit. On this matter, as a late 
commentator shows, the elder poets are dumb. 
Neither the lives of iEchylus, nor Homer nor 
Euripides ; neither the advice of Timothy, nor the 
questions of Psalms; no, not even the admoni- 
tions of Solomon, throw any light on the origin 
of the vine. 

Shall I yet be a vintner. Though, as yet I have 
neither tun nor amphorae, what will my vintage 



212 OUR INLAND SEA. 

be? Shall it resemble the African, the Persian, 
or the Indian Wines? It may be that they shall 
duplicate those of the Chinese, the Russian or the 
Turk. Perhaps those of France or Spain. There 
is Portugal, too. And Switzerland, Italy and 
Hungary, these are all, or in part, lands of the 
vine. Shall my vintage resemble the vintage of 
those lands? Shall it know a furmarium? Shall 
I ever plunge a bottle of wine made from the isl- 
and grapes, to cool in the Wasatch snow? Will 
my wines be a Claret, a Burgundy, a Tokay, a 
Champagne? If I wish them to resemble these 
present sleepy cays of October, then there must 
be thrown into them the heads of poppies, as into 
the Russian wine.* These vines of mine are aris- 
tocratic. There is naught of relationship be- 
tween these cuttings, and the Concord, or any 
crossed or domesticated wild-grapes of the Amer- 
ican woods. These vines knew not of Vinland, 

*The above diary entries were not made entirely in a 
spirit of irony. The luscious fruit that the writer has 
eaten, fruits that were raised on land that had been de- 
clared utterly irreclaimable, made him hopeful of a good 
result. 



OUR INLAND SEA. 213 

nor of Lief, the Lucky. I have learned their pedi- 
gree. The Black Hamburgs themselves are ex- 
clusive. But the others? If after the flood, Tu- 
bal, the son of Japheth,was the first man to settle 
in Spain, then these vines, the Isabellas, are of 
most ancient stock. Indeed, as through my ad- 
visor I learn, they are then related — direct — to 
those cuttings which Noah himself had not neg- 
lected to place in the ark. 

That the grape, wild or cultivated, is not a na- 
tive of these islands, should be no drawback. The 
vine must fight its way. It must, like the human 
being, grow acclimated. My experiment is based 
on these, the soil — fallow for how many thou- 
sand years — the glowing suns. Italy, Spain, 
Switzerland, there is something of all these coun- 
tries in these western lands and skies. 

Caliban, with his mattock and spade, turns up 
the virgin soil. The parts of the grape are there ; 
but the question is, can I be the Prospero who 
shall work a change ? 

Three steps removed — by this time the vines 
should know. From their native East, the par- 



214 OUR INLAND SEA. 

ents were brought to this western land. Ten 
years they stood, aliens, on this primal soil. Then, 
for one year, their children — these cuttings — put 
forth their roots and then they themselves were 
exiled to these island slopes. Of the grapes raised 
on the high benches by the dry farming method 
or by that process which, in this land of irriga- 
tion ditches, is known as "without water," the 
Sultana Seedless and the Purple Damascus, has 
come nearest to being success. But of my one 
thousand vines, the Agawanas — only too few — 
have best stood the test. They have shown the 
more hardihood. They are better qualified, per- 
haps, for this struggle than those of illustrious 
names. 

But this comes to me. In that Indian name — 
Agawana — there lies a thought. Perhaps, after 
all, my belief was at fault. There may have been 
a romantic marriage. Some old-world princess 
of grapes, nurtured in a vineyard of Andalusia, 
may have been wedded to a sturdy vine of the 
primeval woods. That would be less strange 
than the wedding of Pocahontas. 



OUR INLAND SEA. 215 

But there is no romance about the labor my 
vineyard requires. 

What is to come? Walls, dykes, causeways, 
embankments, or whatever the various devices 
should be called ; one of three miles in length, one 
of some ten or twelve miles, and another of about 
eight miles — these were included in the plan of a 
French engineer to metamorphose the Inland 
Sea. From the mainland across the narrow strait, 
between that and the south end of Church Island, 
from the northern end of the same island, to the 
south end of Fremont, and then across the chan- 
nel to the Rocks of Promontory, that would be 
the course of the walls. Will this work be done ? 
The first care of the pioneer is the log stockade or 
the wall of defense. Upon the mainland, such a 
wall exists, or partly so. It is made of conglom- 
erate, that is of earth and pebbles and is among 
the earliest work of the Pioneer. At certain 
spaces were set room-like openings with port- 
holes in the walls and a few of these "forts" yet 
stand. The old wall intimidated the red-man or 



216 OUR INLAND SEA. 

kept away the packs of famished wolves. Many 
years must intervene between that work of the 
early engineers and this monster enterprise to be 
some day. 

And yet another plan, the locomotive is to 
come this way. Instead of over the high hills to 
the northward (Promontory Range), the lines of 
steel are to be carried across the water on tres- 
tles, or the mountain rock, or the sea's heaped- 
up sands. To the south of my island — Strong's 
Knob — will be the objective point, and from 
thence to Lucin, across the level of the open des- 
ert. 

What will this do for Gunnison? Should the 

northwest arm of the Inland Sea, to the north of 
the proposed cut-off, be allowed to dry up, then 
my island will stand in a plain of salt. Carry out 
the Frenchman's plan, and such must be the re- 
sult. Salt-strangled vines must fall to my lot. 
The terrible sterility of the western desert would 
advance this way, and at last surround the island 
shores. If the dykes are built, however, the fresh 
water area will include the whole length of the 



OUR INLAND SEA. 217 

brine, that is from the eastern shores of the 
eastern islands, to the mainland of the eastern 
shore. Willows, rushes, orchards and fields will 
come down to the water's edge, and the many- 
bladed grass take place of the pebbles and sand. 
But the mystery, the ancient poetry of the Inland 
Sea will be gone. 

But O, ye leaves, that I have watched so fond- 
ly, that have sprouted so greenly, that grew so 
bravely, that lived thy allotted days and now 
hang transformed on the parent stem — shall ye 
be the last of a race? O, in the future, grow pur- 
ple my grapes like these autumn hills; be golden 
like this mellow sun; be wan with the October 
frost touch like the haze-paled stars ! 



VOICE OF THE SWAN. 




XIX. 
VOICE OF THE SWAN. 

WITH shortened days and a lowered tem- 
perature, there has been ushered in a 
time of subdued and gloomy splendor. 
For more than a month now huge smoke col- 
umns have stood along the horizon, and by night, 
from the conflagrations among the leaves and 
needles of the mountain oaks and pines, there 
has been reflected across the waters a dull red 
glow. On my island, the tall, coarse grasses, 

221 



222 OUR INLAND SEA. 

scorched stiff by past heat, or beaten by the rains, 
are white each morn with a heavy rime. Long 
since the old and the gray-winged gull have 
flown. There is silence around, but from the 
sky there falls, softened by distance, the disson- 
ant clang of migrating geese, and once I heard 
a sound to stir the blood as one listened, the long, 
rich call of the southward-flying swan. 

From the frozen north the swan has come. He 
has left, amid the piney regions of British Co- 
lumbia, his summer haunts. He has seen the 
Flathead and Yellowstone Lakes; he has rested, 
perhaps, by the source of the Missouri, the head- 
waters of the Lewis and Henry's Forks, and the 
streams of the Couer d-Alene. What sights the 
bird beholds! Since first he winged his flight, 
how changed the scene! In that past year, no 
roads he saw; no quarries that gash the hills; he 
saw not below him the city with its thousand 
lamps ; the smelter with its glare of furnace fires. 
And how dim to the swan must appear the light 
at my window, and how small the hut and my toy 



OUR INLAND SEA. 223 

of an island, the island itself but a speck in the 
Inland Sea. 

And where has "the Drudge" not been? Like 
the bird of passage, he is now in the north, now 
in the south. The life of "my man" has been 
most varied. He has lived by land and sea. He 
would be useful on either of these desert islands. 
He might split slates on Carrington ; watch sheep 
on Fremont; cattle on Stansbury or Church. He 
has dug in the guano-beds and watched my vines. 
When "the Drudge" and I part company, there 
will be regret on one side, at least. 

No life without ambition; no life without ro- 
mance. 

Who does not like to see a reserve in strength. 
Added to the Drudge's giant-like body and limb, 
are unexpected qualities of heart and head. Some 
of these I have learned to admire. Sorrow and 
disappointment have found out my man as many 
another, and in his slow mind he has been com- 
pelled to work out for himself a solution to the 
problems of life. Talkative or tactiturn, one or 



224 OUR INLAND SEA. 

the other, so I find those who have lived much 
alone. The drudge is a happy medium. . I have 
listened to his words and I know his troubles. It 
is not without a bit of quiet vanity that the man 
sees himself so often an occupant of my island 
sketches, nor need I a better critic than the 
Drudge has sometimes been. Extremes meet. 
It is the truly cultured and the rough, unlettered 
who give a valuable judgment. The lesson 
comes often when we least expect it, and not 
without gratification, not unmixed with irony, 
did the maker of the sketches themselves see in 
his animate subject the same thoughts at work 
that passed through his own brain as he pursued 
his different task. 

To-day the Drudge found a piece of wreck. 
Boats seldom come here, and this piece of timber, 
bleached into perfect whiteness by exposure to 
heat and brine, must have floated for many a 
year. Cached among the stones that form the 
base of the crow's nest, on the summit of the 
Northern Cliff, there is a metal cylinder. It con- 



.ti- 



1 , 
1 ■ 



?' ;i 



\ 




■:'k . „. 



OUR INLAND SEA. 225 

tains the names of boats and their crews who 
have touched here from time to time. The num- 
ber is small ; but five boats mentioned and one of 
these is my own. Yet wrecks there have been. 
Perhaps this relic which the Drudge has found, 
is a bit of the Pioneer* It may have come from 
the Star of the West; or it may be from the Plu- 
bustdhf or the Saltcomia. At least its age seems 
to say that it came from one of those initial craft 
of poetic or uneuphonious name, that were first 
to sail on the Inland Sea. 

His palace or his prison," so Kingsley declared, 
England to him must be. My island life has been 
the antithesis of travel. From the day of my ma- 
rooning until now, my adventures, if such they 
be, have all transpired within the confines of this 
one scene. The spectacles of nature which I 
have witnessed, though novel in themselves, have 
all been over these familiar outlines of foreground 
and distance. It has lacked one pleasure of travel 
— surprise. Whether or no one can derive the 
same degree of profit from a daily observation of 



226 OUR INLAND SEA. 

the scenes around a given point, under the chang- 
ing phases of the day and year, and with none or 
a few companions, as he can from a rapid survey, 
in constantly changing company, of widely dis- 
similar scenes, it were difficult to tell. The possi- 
bilities lie in the conditions of mind. Perhaps one 
must be more analytic in his seeing, to enjoy the 
former method of looking at nature and man- 
kind, in preference to the latter. During my 
watching what happenings have been! Events 
fraught with importance to the race have tran- 
spired. But I have been taking concern in the 
changes wrought within the bounds of this small 
place; have been intent upon the doings of a 
mere handful of men, or watching the unfolding 
of a few green leaves. Yet in the pleasure de- 
rived from such a life my island has been made to 
me more a palace than a prison. 

Now comes the end of autumn. The last cold' 
rain has frozen as it fell. In sheets and ice-em- 
bossings it gleams on the island rocks. There is 
a tone of menace, or a moan-like sound as the 



OUR INLAND SEA. 227 

night-wind moves through the narrow space be- 
tween my hut and the cliff. 

"The suns grow meek, and the meek suns grow 
brief." 

Dark stand the somber hills, brown under their 
chilly glaze. Still there lingers at eve a crimson 
glow on the eastern heights, and deeply yellow — 
aureolin-tinted, dashed with cadmium — are the 
western skies. Along the horizons, the moun- 
tain chains — their slopes still marked with some 
former color, and on their summits the white of 
the newly-fallen snow — show luminous through 
the ambient air. The autumn passes, yet it passes 
in specious mien. 

Long since the old and the gray-winged gulls 
have flown. There is silence around. But once 
more there falls from out the sky, and softened 
by distance, the dissonant clang of migrating 
geese. Once more I hear, a sound to stir the 
blood as one listens, the trumpet call of the 
southward flying swan. 



A LAST DRIFT-WOOD FIRE. 




XX. 

A LAST DRIFT-WOOD FIRE. 

MY friends are here; my household goods 
are piled aboard the yacht. The boats of 
the sifters departed ere this one arrived ; 
the Gunnison for a time, will be given over to 
solitude again. 

These 36,806,400 seconds; 613,440 minutes; 
10,224 hours; 426 days, 60 6-7 weeks, these 14 

231 



232 OUR INLAND SEA. 

months ; or, to bring the calculation to a finer di- 
vision, and one of nature's own, 42,940,800, one- 
sixtieth part of those heart-beats that go to make 
up man's allotment of three score years and ten — 
these since my roof-tree was placed. Now my 
homesteading is done and I am free to depart. So 
many heart-beats while I lay asleep, so many 
passed in action, so many in reverie; so many 
given to this and so many to that, and the time 
has slipped away. Can it be that fourteen months 
have elapsed already. Not so long ago it seems 
as yesterday since the yacht, that now waits to 
bear me from hence, entered with its unusual 
cargo, this desert port. Short now seems the 
time since we embarked with our boat's sails set 
wing to wing ; since we passed one by one the ter- 
minal peaks of the Desert Range, and opened out 
the bays and straits, as slowly we came from the 
south, and so, by the jutting rocks and black head 
of Strong's Knob, came at last to these island 
shores, and I began my now completed vigil. 

One of the strange things in life is this — there 
is no experience one would care to have missed. 



OUR INLAND SEA. 233 

I mean when once that experience is passed and 
gone. So it is with this one — / should dislike to 
part ivith it noiu* What I had done, had I not 
performed this act, who can tell? This is not an 
arc to determine my circle and yet — 

Under certain conditionst a place becomes a 
part of us; zue ozun it* We absorb it into our 
lives* It cannot be taken from us* It is ours, 
and without title or deed. We are associated 
with a certain spot of earth, we have our lives 
shaped by it, or, if that be not the case, Jve 
stamp the place <with our individuality* 
THIS PLACE IS MINE. 

Here I make an inventory of property and ben- 
efits accrued to me, since the day of my House- 
warming : 

A desert island, that is an island which is a des- 
ert now, but if water shall come from below 
these rocks, one whereon I may yet eat the grape 
from the vine, if not the fig from the tree. 

My Hut, a place of refuge, a rock of strength. 



234 OUR INLAND SEA. 

A step toward an understanding of the noble 
Art of Horticulture: "Do men gather grapes of 
thorns, or figs of thistles?" 

A proof undeniable of the fact that it is always 
the unexpected that happens. An opening of the 
eyes to the truth that surrender is sometimes a 
victory. A seeing, too, that while we stand fum- 
bling at the door which is locked, another may 
stand wide open. 

To see plainly, to know by actual climbing, that 
mountain which lies between the moment of re- 
solve and the moment of achievement. 

To comprehend the astonishing fact which 
Aurelius has pointed out: that in self-examina- 
tion, one is not only himself, both plaintiff and 
defendant, but judge and jury as well. Also the 
attorney for the prosecution, and for the defense. 

To see the true relationship between the stem 
justice of the Mosaic Law, and the greater power 
of the Golden Rule. 

That although Charity begins at Home, it 
should not end there. 

An understanding of the verse of Ecclesiastes : 



OUR INLAND SEA. 235 

"Wherefore I perceive that there is nothing 
better than that a man should rejoice in his own 
works, for that is his portion : For who shall see 
what shall come after him?" 

Also the verse of Revelations: 

"Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased 
with goods, and have need of nothing ; and know- 
est not that thou art wretched and miserable, and 
poor and blind and naked." 

Therefore — 

To realize that the motive should be in the 
deed and not the event. 

To learn the wisdom that lies in Contempla- 
tion and the forsaking of Works. 

And the majesty that lies in the simple words: 

"Man shall not live by bread alone, but by 
every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of 
God." 

And besides these benefits — 

A bronzed countenance, and a gain in physical 
strength and well-being. 

A house-cleaning of the brain; a discarding of 
useless furniture therein ; together with a sweep- 



236 OUR INLAND SEA. 

ing out o£ cob-webbed corners, and a general ad- 
mittance of wholesome light and air. 

Lastly — 

The virtue of possessing my soul in patience, 
and the memory of four hundred, twenty-six 
days, the effect of which, mentally, I cannot just 
at present weigh, but which I believe will be ben- 
eficial. 

Not a poor investment of time, surely, nor one 
likely to cause me regret. 

Tonight we illumined the island with a drift- 
wood fire. An enormous pile we made; the 
trunks and branches of the Sacrobatus, the pine 
and the fir, storm-torn from their native rocks, 
and by the course of many waters, brought to 
these alien shores. 

Music? — is not the charm of out-door music 
everywhere the same? "Music at Nightfall," 
touches all hearts alike. Savage and civilized na- 
tions are alike in this. Around their watch-fires 



OUR INLAND SEA. 237 

chant the American Indian, the native Austra- 
lian, the Botocudor of Brazil. At twilight the 
Laplander sings his reindeer song, the Arab 
touches the tambor, the Russian utters the Song 
of the Steppe. Then the Arcadian blows upon 
the pan-pipes, then is heard the Yodle of the Ty- 
rolean mountaineer. On the waves of Mediter- 
ranean, the fjords of Norway, the fisherman be- 
guiles his time with song. Then the ferrymen on 
some Highland Loch, on famed Killarney, keeps 
time with voice and oar-beat. Probably the an- 
cient Briton, paddling his coracle of wicker, was 
as susceptible to the influence of out-door music, 
as were the Venetians in their gondolas, or as is 
the dusky steersman of today, gliding in the dah- 
abeeh up or down old Nile. 

A grotesque spectacle we must have made as 
we sang beneath the stars. Brothers to the sav- 
age and the minstrel, we drew the continents to- 
gether and made the races one. As filled with 
animal life and roused emotions, we sent a mel- 
ody across the waste, we heard an obligato of 
v/ind and sea. My own and the sifter's hut, the 



238 OUR INLAND SEA. 

naked peak, and the curving sands ; the breaking 
waves; the hull; the masts; the rigging o£ the 
waiting yacht; the trellised slopes; the wings of 
passing sea-gulls ; each rock and bush, each ridge 
and well-known crag, were reddened in the 
night-fire's glow. 



GUNNISON ISLAND— FAREWELL. 




XXI 
GUNNISON ISLAND— FAREWELL. 

44 A KIND of shock that sets one's heart 



I\ 



ajar. 



At 5 A. M. we quitted the bay. Land and 
sea were but vaguely defined. There was a 
struggle between moonlight and dawn. Our 
mainsail was double-reefed for we entertained 
misgivings of the weather outside. The wind 

241 



242 OUR INLAND SEA. 

had been dead to the north and, since midnight, 
blowing hard. On our side of the hill, the water 
was somewhat sheltered, but wake as often as we 
would, we heard the crashing of waves on the 
northern shore. 

Half a mile from the island and we began to 
catch the wind. It was not so boisterous at first, 
but there was enough to make my Home fall rap- 
idly astern. In a very short time, Gunnison ap- 
peared to be farther away than Strong's Knob, 
six miles to the south, and its outlines were ex- 
ceedingly grand. 

Soon, however, there was little time for admir- 
ing the scene. Winds and waves increased until 
the latter would have tossed a good-sized ship. 
The point we desired to make lay about twenty 
miles distant, somewhat south of east, so that our 
course was nearly along a trough of the sea, but 
in order to quarter the waves, we directed our 
course more northerly. 

With the waves already so high, and the wind 
increasing, anxious faces might have been seen 
upon the yacht. Not but that we expected to 



OUR INLAND SEA, 243 

weather it through all right, but when it taxed 
the strength of two men to manage the tiller of 
such a tiny craft as ours, then affairs were be- 
coming serious. Perhaps as a landsman, I over- 
estimated the danger, but still I believe, even 
were such the case, that every man on board the 
boat devoutly wished himself ashore. Not in any 
craven way. Perish the thought! Not wishing 
to have evaded the danger then and there, and 
thus have missed its lesson, but, rather, that we 
had fought it successfully through. All men, save 
bom cowards, must know of the thrill, the secret 
sense of exultation, engendered sometimes in the 
presence of danger. To those who pass their 
lives in a continual security, must sometimes 
come a longing, the knowledge of a desire not 
satisfied. In the present case, it might be argued, 
there was no way of escape ; true, but under sim- 
ilar circumstances, no one need expect to make a 
cruise across the Inland Sea, without incurring 
the same amount of risk. 

By sunrise, the blow had come to its hardest. 
The "white squall" was strong indeed. The waves 



244 OUR INLAND SEA. 

had a vicious appearance, the foam torn fiercely 
from off their crests. We experienced one try- 
ing moment as we dropped the reefed mainsail, a 
huge green wave striking the boat a terrific blow. 
For the moment we were surrounded in hissing 
foam. The next minute we were high on a crest, 
the foresail holding us steadily enough to the 
wind. 

That was the turning point; we began to 
breathe. The waves grew no higher; soon we 
fancied they were growing less. What a magnif- 
icent sight it was, as the sun lifting above a low 
bank of clouds, streamed on the turbulent sea! 
Struck by the level rays, how old the western 
mountains appeared ; centuries upon centuries of 
age seemed suddenly heaped on their heads. To- 
ward the sun how beautiful it was! The high, 
transparent waves pierced through by the light, 
so that they came forward like craggy walls, em- 
erald below, and topaz above. 

"The yellow beam he throws. 
Gilds the green wave that trembles as it glows." 



OUR INLAND SEA. 245 

Only those lines were never written to describe 
such a wild, tumultuous, onsweeping of waters 
such as we looked upon. 

In another hour we had reached comparative 
quiet. Under the shelter of the tall Promontory 
Hills, the Inland Sea only acknowledged the past 
blow by running in short, jerky swells, the most 
trying to landsmen of all motions of water, and 
was fast approaching a state of calm. 

While coming through the channel, between 
Fremont Island and Promontory Point, we made 
a stop at the latter place. Looking westward, a 
bluff of light-colored sandstone, with lower pro- 
jections of wave-washed slate, jutted boldly over 
the quiet water. Across the sea, the western 
mountains showed beautifully clear, especially 
the Stansbury Island, whose two high domes 
stood darkly-shadowed against the sharp, dim 
snow-peaks of the Tuilla Range. Over their 
summits was now a massy cumulus, lovely in 
form and color. Seen near by, the cloud was 
probably of a dazzling whiteness, with a sugges- 
tion of thunder in the lurid shadows, but from 



246 OUR INLAND SEA. 

our far distance, it showed on the sky in the most 
exquisite aerial tints. 

Northward of this, across the great main body 
of the sea, which we had just placed behind us, 
amid the paleness of distance and the closing 
year, I sought to distinguish a well-known outline. 
Alas! It had vanished from sight — Gunnison 
Island, farewell. 



SUPPLEMENT. 



SUPPLEMENT. 

IT may not be out of place to give here, a few 
general thoughts upon the Inland Sea. Sev- 
eral letters of which I am in receipt since the 
first publication of this book, contain various 
questions which are answered herein. In most 
cases, the questions asked are indicative of a de- 
sire on the part of their writers, to become ac- 
quainted with the scenes this book suggests, as 
well as those actually described. 

The Inland Sea bears the reputation of being a 
most dangerous as well as a novel sheet of water, 
and the reputation is merited. Like all moun- 
tain-locked seas, this one is subject to quick and 
sudden change. It has iron-bound shores — at 
places — ugly cross-currents, and these, in connec- 
tion with sunken reefs, often cramp the mariner 
in a choice of sea-room. In a cruise of any length 
heavy seas are likely to be met with. It is almost 
impossible for those whose sailing has been lim- 

249 



250 OUR INLAND SEA. 

ited to lighter waters, to realize the force with 
which the briny waves can strike. In spite of its 
density, however, the water has a peculiar apti- 
tude for transmitting motion, so that in a short 
time the waves rise to a trying height, though, be 
it understood, they fall as quickly upon the ces- 
sation of a blow. 

Promontory Point is associated in my mind 
with another stress, other than that one already 
described. In the month of April, and near the 
spot that gave us before so kindly a shelter, I 
passed, but in another boat — the Argo — the prop- 
erty of Judge Wenner of Fremont Island, as 
nasty a day as one would care to see. On the 
previous evening, we had anchored in a neighbor- 
ing channel, and on the morning of Easter Sun- 
day attempted the Gunnison run. By a coming 
storm, we were forced back again to the shore. 
This time we were caught on the west side of 
Promontory Ridge, and for thirteen long hours 
we faced the teeth of a northwest gale, that, like 
a living and infuriated creature, lashed and 
roared around us. 



OUR INLAND SEA. 251 

Who was the first white man to visit an island 
in the Inland Sea? When, in the company of Kit 
Carson, "The Pathfinder," in 1843, rode over to 
the Disappointment Island — as they first named 
the Fremont— he thought that their boat was the 
very first to touch on that island shore. But of 
the truth of that supposition, there is reason to 
doubt. Who cut the cross on the face of the 
rock? This, too, is unknown. The same man, it 
may be, one of the zealous old missionaries who 
lost that crucifix and rosary, which were recently 
dug up, from a depth of four feet below the sur- 
face of the ground, by some laborers engaged in 
cutting a water-ditch, in one of the valleys of the 
eastern shore. We know therefrom that the Cath- 
olic missionaries traversed the neighboring val- 
leys, and that they might have visited some of the 
nearer islands, why should we doubt? The cross 
on Fremont was cut on the smooth face of a rock, 
now fast crumbling away, and is toward the 
north. By some it has been imagined that the 
emblem was cut by Carson, but Fremont does 



252 OUR INLAND SEA. 

not mention it in his report, although he wrote of 
some trifling matters, the loss of the telescope 
cover, for instance. This object has been much 
sought after. Judge Wenner lived for several 
years with his wife and children, and is now bur- 
ied on Fremont Island. Church Island — Ante- 
lope — had early an occupant. The young army 
officer, whose name the island bears, preceded 
me to Gunnison. But myself, I believe, was the 
first to live for love on one of the islands of the 
Inland Sea. 

In several letters questions have been asked in 
regard to effects of mirage. In the accompany- 
ing diagram are shown three effects of mirage on 
the Inland Sea. Such are rarely seen. But they 
may sometimes be witnessed on a hot afternoon 
in July or August, although increased humidity in 
the surrounding atmosphere, owing to irrigation, 
etc., threaten to do away with them entirely. 
Figure I is a bit of western shore, detached by 
mirage and apparently floating in air, land and 
reflection being indistinguishable, and the hori- 



OUR INLAND SEA. 253 

zon line eaten away. In Figure II, there is the 
same effect of land and reflection, but, instead of 
appearing to float in the air, there is a semblance 
to some strange barge moving along the horizon. 
This horizon is, as will readily be imagined, a 
false one, and is caused by a breeze moving on 
the near water, while the true horizon is calm and 
lost in the sky. 

In color there is a witchery about the mirage 
far beyond the reach of the artist's palette. Thus, 
in Figure II, the sky was of a golden-gray, abso- 
lutely dazzling with light, while the island and 
its reflection were of a fiery yet decided blue. In 
Figure III, again of islands floating in air — in re- 
ality a line of hills — the color was altogether ex- 
quisite ; golden-gray sky, gold- white clouds, with 
distant water the same tint as the sky, which, in- 
deed, it appeared to be. Nearer the water was of 
a pale, almost invisible green, crossed by waves, 
not perceptible to the eye as such, but as dim 
blurs, caused by the faintest, gentlest touch of 
winds. 

There is another phenomenon to be seen at in- 



254 OUR INLAND SEA. 

frequent periods on the Inland Sea, one that is 
unpaintable, and also, I believe, entirely local. 
It is to be witnessed during the calm summer twi- 
lights, when the pale, fairy-like tints on the water 
are breathed upon by opposite currents of lan- 
guid wind. As they interplay in bands, in points, 
in shifting isles of amber, azure and rose, the 
whole surface of the sea shimmers and gleams 
like a silken robe studded with countless pearls. 

The completion of the Ogden-Lucin Cut-off of 
the Southern Pacific Railway has wrought a 
change. The long line of piles and rock fillings 
of that great enterprise has materially altered the 
conditions on the upper end of the Inland Sea. 
There is now a station on the rocks at Point 
Promontory, and another near Strong's Knob, on 
the western shore. The naptha launch or the 
cutter has supplanted the sail boat. The Augusta, 
or either of her sister boats of the fleet, runs 
across in an hour or two those long reaches of 
water where the sail-boat lies becalmed, or la- 
bors slowly against an adverse wind. The ma- 
chine has its practical superiority, the sail its 



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OUR INLAND SEA. 255 

poetry.* I contrast in my mind, a midnight an- 
chorage near Strong's Knob — my first visit — 

when the great conoidal hill lay pale in the misty 
moonlight, and where, in the protected waters of 
a desert bay, I was lulled to sleep by the noise of 
waves outside, and that one which lately I passed 
at the same place. Now I listened in my waking 
moments, from the bed of that home-like car, to 
the throb and rumble of the passing trains, bear- 
ing their passengers and commerce across the 
land. 

Gunnison Island and the view from its peak 
are somewhat changed. I mean since the Cambria, 
departed the bay. From the Crow's Nest, the 
long line of the Cut-off is seen in silhouette 
against the shining water; the locomotives with 
their plumes of smoke, cind long trains of cars ap- 
pearing in the midst of the extended scene most 
Lilliputian. Very lonely and desolate was the isl- 
and itself. No living soul was there. No an- 

*My first cruise was made in the yacht Maud, owned by 
Mr. A. S. Patterson, but the greater number in the cata- 
maran Cambria, built and owned by Mr. D. L. Davis. 



256 OUR INLAND SEA. 

swer came to the salute that was given by the 
Augusta* s whistle. The door of my hut stood 
open ; the sifter's cabin was empty. A couple of 
wild mice scampered across the hut floor, and 
disappeared through a hole they had made. With 
this exception, I saw not a thing of life. My 
vines were dead, not a stem or shoot of my hope 
had lived. But a growth of thorn and bramble 
was on that cairn which told of a human tragedy. 
A huge raven that circled around and around, 
and uttered its dismal croaks just above the island 
peak, did not once alight. Was that sable thing 
a living bird? Or was it the shade of Devil? As 
I stepped again aboard the Augustdt I noticed, 
near the boat's prow, a drowning butterfly. Its 
extended and bright blue wings quivered con- 
vulsively, as, helpless, it drifted across the brine. 
And so ends the tale. 



FEB i^ 190^ 



X 



Iliiimiimiiim 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 





017 063 711 2 



